Foreign hackers take aim at homebound Americans

Federal officials and experts are warning that foreign cyber criminals are targeting U.S. businesses and Americans who are working from home on less-secure networks during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Millions of Americans have shifted to working at home indefinitely to help halt the spread of COVID-19, placing them outside of more secure office networks and away from company IT professionals.

According to a senior intelligence official, foreign cyber criminals are taking notice.

“We see extensive criminal use of ransomware, some of which are clearly Russian criminals, there is a lot of that there,” the official told reporters Wednesday on targeting of American companies and employees. “We do carefully pursue where we see nation state usage, that is certainly an area of intel development as well.”

Ransomware attacks, which have spiked during the pandemic, involve a hacker gaining access to a network, encrypting it, and demanding payment to allow the user access again.

The official’s comments were made in response to questions around a report published last month by Symantec, a division of cybersecurity group Broadcom.

Symantec’s Critical Attack Discovery and Intelligence Team found that a Russian cyber criminal group known as “Evil Corp” was targeting Fortune 500 companies, in at least one case potentially accessing networks of U.S. newspapers by targeting company employees.

Evil Corp was previously sanctioned by the Treasury Department in December for allegedly stealing more than $100 million from banks and financial institutions in over 40 countries.

Marc Rogers, the executive director of cybersecurity at software group Okta, told The Hill he was not surprised that foreign-based cyber criminals were targeting Americans during the pandemic, describing the current situation as a “golden opportunity.”

“This is an unprecedented opportunity for them, there has never been a worldwide event of this scale during the digital era,” Rogers told The Hill on Thursday.