FBI Failed To Notify 70+ US Officials Targeted By Russian Hackers (apnews.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the AP: The FBI failed to notify scores of U.S. officials that Russian hackers were trying to break into their personal Gmail accounts despite having evidence for at least a year that the targets were in the Kremlin's crosshairs, The Associated Press has found. Nearly 80 interviews with Americans targeted by Fancy Bear, a Russian government-aligned cyberespionage group, turned up only two cases in which the FBI had provided a heads-up. Even senior policymakers discovered they were targets only when the AP told them, a situation some described as bizarre and dispiriting.

"It's utterly confounding," said Philip Reiner, a former senior director at the National Security Council, who was notified by the AP that he was targeted in 2015. "You've got to tell your people. You've got to protect your people." The FBI declined to answer most questions from AP about how it had responded to the spying campaign... A senior FBI official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss the hacking operation because of its sensitivity, declined to comment on timing but said that the bureau was overwhelmed by the sheer number of attempted hacks... A few more were contacted by the FBI after their emails were published in the torrent of leaks that coursed through last year's electoral contest. But to this day, some leak victims have not heard from the bureau at all.
Here's an interesting statistic from the AP's analysis. "Out of 312 U.S. military and government figures targeted by Fancy Bear, 131 clicked the links sent to them."

Comments

Just a guess

[Anonymous Coward]

The FBI didn't want to compromise their ongoing operation. If they had notified the victims, even without disclosing that the hackers were thought to be from Russia, that would've probably caused some of the victims to tip off the fact that there was an FBI investigation into the mail hack.

Yep. Targeted + phishing = professional

[raymorris]

You're quite right. If they specifically target 325 named government officials, as in this case, with tailored emails, that's spear phishing and very much the kind of thing sophisticated professionals will do. Once they have access using the credentials of the deputy director of the NSA, they would then move laterally to own most of the NDA network.

Targets such as the director, deputy director, and top network / database administrators is gold. That's even better than arbitrary code execution on some random system with an unprivileged account, which is what Hollywood-style hacking normally results in. (Though if you can follow that up with privilege escalation on a critical system, that gets even more interesting).

Yes, indeed I do this for a living.

Re:Russian "hackers"

[Hal_Porter]

Yup, and his IT guy didn't notice the bit.ly link for change password.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-...

https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

When we sent these out I was saying to Dmitry 'No one is going to be dumb enough to click on that. He'll call his IT guy and they'll tell him not to click it'. And he said to me 'Volodya, these Americans have heads full of post modernism and spirit cooking. Their precious bodily essences have been contaminated with soy milk. They'll fall for it, like traitor drinking polonium!'.

And, Hail Great Leader Putin, it worked! KGB Deep Cover Agent Donaldovich Trumpovski was successfully installed as US President.

No doubt he'll call off the confrontational 'Red Line' policies of the former accursed Imperialist administration in Syria any day now and allow our pilots to operate their unmolested.