The Corporate Vice President of Customer Security, Tim Burt, at Microsoft said there are many bad actors trying to attack the customers of the company by setting up the fake phishing domains for targeting Microsoft customers. The members of the Microsoft’s security team found that there is a site set up by Russian Hackers which was specifically being used for congressional candidates.
“We have discovered that a fake Microsoft domain has been established as the landing page for phishing attacks and we have also found that metadata that is being redirected to three candidates.”
The company has alerted the US law enforcement agencies and are working alongside the government to take down these websites. We took down the domain and working with the government, were able to prevent anyone from being affected by the unusual attack,” Burt said. “They did not get in, they tried, they were not victorious, and the state security teams get a lot of credit for that.”
The Phishing methods are the primary ways to exploit access to the political organisations. Although it is not easy to access the Microsoft servers as it requires 2-factor authentication. He also said they are not seeing the same level of activity as they have seen in the 2016 presidential election. The company has also launched a program called defending the democracy which provides support for state election authorities which is an effort to safeguard the electoral process.
Burt came on the panel with Facebook Head of Product Policy and Counterterrorism Monika Bickert, Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Cybersecurity and Communications Jeannette Manfra, and Washington State Secretary of State Kim Wyman. Wyman told that Washington had seen failed efforts to gain access to electoral systems in 2016 from Russia and was expecting more to come.
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