Russian spies accused of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election have spent much of the past two years abusing virtual private networks (VPNs) to target hundreds of organizations worldwide, U.S. and British authorities said on Thursday. Reuters reports: The governments said in a joint advisory that Unit 26165, the arm of Russia’s military spy agency whose officers were indicted for allegedly breaking into Democratic Party emails, had been using VPNs and Tor – a privacy-focused network – to conduct “widespread, distributed, and anonymized brute force access attempts against hundreds of government and private sector targets.” The advisory did not identify any of the targets by name, saying only that they were mainly in the United States and Europe and included government offices, political parties, energy companies, law firms and media organizations. The National Security Agency (NSA) today also disclosed details of “brute force” methods they say have been used by Russian intelligence to try to break into the cloud services of hundreds of government agencies, energy companies and other organizations.

Earlier this week, law enforcement seized the servers and customer logs for DoubleVPN, a Russian-based VPN service that was reportedly used by cyber criminals to hide their activities while conducting ransomware attacks, phishing campaigns and other malicious hacking operations.

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Source: Slashdot – Russian Hackers Are Abusing VPNs To Hijack Accounts, US and UK Officials Say