Bellingcat journalists encounter phishing attempt that proved unsuccessful

Bellingcat, a website which posts investigative news recently stated that a phishing attack tried to compromise the ProtonMail accounts of a number of its employees but couldn't succeed, as per the electronic mail service provider and the journalists from the website. There was no hack of data while, however sophisticated the assault was still the determined threat actor was unsuccessful indicating it was barely an easy task for filching data that ProtonMail stored.

Targeting journalists from Bellingcat, which is adorned with winning an award, the phishing assault tried tricking end-users so they would divulge passwords of their ProtonMail accounts. The website is well-known for finding the agents responsible for poisoning Sergei Skripal the ex-Russian spy inside Britain. In the phishing attempt under discussion, the attackers resorted to Swiss domains created for impersonating the user interface of ProtonMail while paid for the same via third-parties making untraceable transactions of Bitcoins.

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins tweeted that once again the website discovered cyber attacks targeting it, almost surely connected with the site's work related to Russia. Perhaps, one method for measuring Bellingcat's impact was accounting the frequency at which the Russian government's agencies attempted at attacking it, no matter whether their media, trolls or hackers were responsible, Higgins suggested. www.techcrunch.com posted this, July 27, 2019.

As accords to Geneva-situated ProtonMail, clues appear as indicating that the failed attack originated from Russia. ProtonMail claiming to provide the best security globally to its e-mail system, is getting more-and-more popular among journalists as well as others dealing with sensitive information since it practices end-to-end encryption of its user communications.

Andy Yen, chief executive of ProtonMail stated the phishing attack was a best run operation they had ever seen in defrauding attempts. Christo Grozev a Bellingcat journalist and leader of the website's investigation into the Skripal incidence said he was fully sure that the military intelligence of GRU in Russia was responsible as well as that the attack attained a significant jump in its technical sophistication. According to him, the attack showed extreme conviction, although no reporter of Bellingcat could be duped into divulging his password.

» SPAMfighter News - 8/8/2019