Russian Group That Hacked DNC Used NSA Attack Code In Attack On Hotels (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A Russian government-sponsored group accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee last year has likely been infecting other targets of interest with the help of a potent Windows exploit developed by, and later stolen from, the National Security Agency, researchers said Friday. Eternal Blue, as the exploit is code-named, is one of scores of advanced NSA attacks that have been released over the past year by a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. It was published in April in the group's most damaging release to date. Its ability to spread from computer to computer without any user action was the engine that allowed the WCry ransomware worm, which appropriated the leaked exploit, to shut down computers worldwide in May. Eternal Blue also played a role in the spread of NotPetya, a follow-on worm that caused major disruptions in June. Now, researchers at security firm FireEye say they're moderately confident the Russian hacking group known as Fancy Bear, APT 28, and other names has also used Eternal Blue, this time in a campaign that targeted people of interest as they connected to hotel Wi-Fi networks. In July, the campaign started using Eternal Blue to spread from computer to computer inside various staff and guest networks, company researchers Lindsay Smith and Ben Read wrote in a blog post. While the researchers didn't directly observe those attacks being used to infect guest computers connected to the network, they said a related campaign from last year used the control of hotel Wi-Fi services to obtain login credentials from guest devices.

Comments

Re:Fix the shitty, deceptive headline, /. editors!

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, don't be so harsh, BeauHD did the best he can. Give him a prize for trying, instead, so he doesn't feel left out.

Re:Demoncrats lost their sense of humor

[Rockoon]

This.

it has been determined that the "hackers" downloaded the DNC emails at a rate of 22 MEGABYTES per second. This sort of connection isnt available across the atlantic, and isnt available from any ISP in the States.

But such a connection IS available with a local area network, and further such a speed happens to coincide with the write speed of a large USB thumb drive.