Russian Hacker Threatens Oil & Gas Energy Companies

Russian hackers are now targeting US and Europe based energy companies with the possibility that they could disrupt the country’s power supply.

According to security group Symantec Corporation, “Energetic Bear” appears to be backed by a government agency considering that they have the “resources, size and organization” to hijack electricity firms, petroleum pipeline operators and other “strategically important” energy companies.

Also known as “Dragonfly” the team has been active since 2011 and has found to work like a typical employee: Mondays to Fridays starting fresh at 9:00AM and capping their day at 6:00PM (most likely on European time zone). This too goes along the line of the increasing number of cyber attacks to companies and government offices who are connecting themselves to the Internet. sources also say that the hackers are somewhat following several unnamed governments that uses hacking as a political strategy. this may be so or otherwise, “Dragonfly” has already exploited half of the United States and Spain, while other European countries including Greece, Serbia, Romania, Turkey, Poland, Italy, Germany and France were also in their line of fire.

an Irvine, California based “web adversary” sniffer also pointed that the group also targets the European government, US health care providers and defense suppliers while a security body based in Helsinki saw its shift to the industrial world back earlier this year.

Symantec, who has been tracking Dragonfly’s unwanted works since 2012, admitted that the group is “well resourced” and is equipped with a wide array of malware tools with a capability to launch various attacks “through a number of different vectors”.