Russia using Ukraine as Cyberwarfare testing ground via Gamaredon

Russian funded Gamaredon hacking group has reportedly intensified its cyberattack campaigns against Ukraine; according to a recent report published in ‘SentinelOne’-endpoint protection providing software company.
 
 SentinelOne has highlighted in its report that Russia seems to have made the critical infrastructure of Ukraine as a testing ground to test its newly developed cyberwarfare tools which are mainly targeting Ukraine’s Military and law enforcement IT infra since 2013.
 
 News is out that Gamaredon has intensified its campaign against Ukraine government from December last year which could trigger a political confrontation between two countries at any moment. Sources report that hackers of Gameredon have devised socially engineered messages laced with excel and word malware addressing macro protections and spoofing Microsoft certificates in order to improve the success rate of their attacks.
 
 Gamaredon aka Advanced Persistent Threat(APT) hacking group which is a pro-Russian in nature has so far conducted espionage on Hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi National Ground Forces Academy, along with local paramilitary groups which include Donbas Militias.
 
 The actions were confirmed by the Ukraine Security Service on Jan 25th,2020 which included in its statement that in 2019 over 482 cyber attacks were launched by Gamaredon on the sensitive infrastructure of the nation and some journalists- all to create political and military rifts.
 
 Furthermore, the hacking group in the discussion was also suggested to be behind the propagation of Pterodo malware on Ukraine’s infrastructure in 2018.
 
 So, from whatever has been revealed by SentinelOne, one thing is confirmed that both the nations are fighting a virtual war which might intensify shortly. And the repercussions might go beyond our expectations.
 
 What’s your say ‘Swarm of Bees’….?