Google: Russian hackers target a NATO’s Center of Excellence and Eastern European militaries

Russian hackers have recently tried to hack the networks of military institutions in Eastern Europe, according to a Google threat analysis group report published on Wednesday, 30 of March.

The report does not specify which countries were under the hacker attack, only that it was a phishing campaign targeting accounting data, which the Russian-based Coldriver group, or Callisto, is responsible for. The attacks used recently created Gmail accounts and targeted non-Google accounts, so the success rate of these attacks is still unknown.

The Google report claimed that the group also attacked a NATO Centre of Excellence, but it did not provide the details. For their part, a NATO spokesman did not directly confirm the information in the report, but noted that “they see malicious cyber activity every day,” and clarified that although the NATO Center of Excellence cooperates with the Alliance, it is not part of it.

In 2019, Finnish cybersecurity firm F-Secure Labs characterized the Callisto group as an unidentified but cutting-edge hacker group engaged in intelligence gathering connected to foreign policy in Europe.