Russian Bear

The October 2021 edition of the Microsoft Digital Defense Report, released last Thursday(https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2021/10/07/digital-defense-report-2021), reports that 58% of all cyberattacks Redmond saw launched from nation-states originated from Russia. North Korea came in second at 23%, Iran third at 11%, and China was fourth at a mere 8%.

As seen in such episodes as the Russia-launched SolarWinds supply-chain attack, these intrusions now focus on governments—the target of 53% of Russian activity since July 2020, but just 3% in the previous period of nation-state data (July 2019 to June 2020). And they’re getting better at it, raising their success rate from 21% in that previous period to 32% since last July.

The United States and Ukraine are the top two targets of nation-state attacks overall, at 46% and 19%, respectively, and worldwide most of these are aimed at governments (48%), followed by non-governmental organizations and policy groups (31%).

Microsoft’s report observes that many organizations continue to fail to practice basic security measures. For example, it notes that less than 20% of Microsoft’s own customers use such “strong authentication” measures as multiple-factor authentication, a statistic it calls “shocking.” It also cites a Microsoft survey of Internet-of-Things attacks that found 20,994,693 cases of IoT devices that had “admin” as their admin password.

If you want a reason not to reach for the vodka after all that bad news, Microsoft’s report cites such signs of progress as a 220% jump in strong authentication use over the last 18 months and increasing transparency among victims of ransomware and other attacks. It also commends such recent US government actions as President Biden’s May 12 executive order requiring more government-industry cooperation and stronger basic security standards at both federal agencies and the private-industry contractors working for them.

Bottom line is information security remains a bear of a problem—most often, a Russian bear. Microsoft’s latest report on digital attacks cites the Russian Federation as the top source of nation-state attacks and one of the most destructive ones.