Iran, Russia and North Korea changed cyber attack tactics in the last year, says Microsoft

Microsoft users face more than 600 million cyber attacks every day, partly fuelled by a growing trend of cyber crime gangs working with nation states, according to a new report by the company.

In this year’s Digital Defence report, Microsoft said countries like Russia, Iran and North Korea have changed how they worked in the last year, including starting to experiment with AI.

“We must find a way to stem the tide of this malicious cyber activity,” said Tom Burt, the company’s vice president of customer security and trust.

“That includes continuing to harden our digital domains to protect our networks, data, and people at all levels.”

Russia appears to have “outsourced” some of its cyber espionage to criminal gangs, especially around its spying in Ukraine, and in June, a suspected cyber crime group managed to compromise at least 50 Ukrainian military devices.

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In North Korea, a new piece of ransomware tech was developed called FakePenny, which Microsoft says the country used against defence and aerospace organisations.

Iran “placed significant focus on Israel” and is accused of hacking Israeli dating sites. Cyber criminals working for the country then allegedly offered to remove specific users from their hacked databases for a fee.

The number of ransomware attacks around the world more than doubled in the last year, according to the report, with hackers tending to use email, SMS and voice scams to try and access users’ information.

The use of artificial intelligence in cyber attacks also increased in the last year, with criminals linked to Russia and China using AI-generated content to try and trick users.

However “so far, we have not observed this content being effective in swaying audiences,” said Mr Burt.