Hackers targeted and breached third-party information technology contractors for the Republican National Committee last week, the GOP said Tuesday.
But the hackers did not access any RNC data during the break-in, according to a statement from committee chief of staff Richard Walters.
“Over the weekend, we were informed that Synnex, a third party provider, had been breached,” Walters said in the statement. “We immediately blocked all access from Synnex accounts to our cloud environment.”
“Our team worked with Microsoft to conduct a review of our systems and after a thorough investigation, no RNC data was accessed. We will continue to work with Microsoft, as well as federal law enforcement officials on the matter,” the statement added.
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Walters’s statement did not address a Bloomberg report that said the computer systems were targeted with ransomware in an attack by Russian cybercrime group APT29, also known as Cozy Bear.
The incident follows multiple recent and high-profile ransomware attacks on U.S. infrastructure suspected to be by Russian hackers. President Joe Biden said he brought up the issue during his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin last month.
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JBS, the United States’s largest beef producer, said in June it paid an $11 million ransom after the company’s computer systems were targeted, forcing a temporary shutdown in May. The White House said JBS informed it that a Russian criminal hacking organization, REvil, was likely responsible for the attack on the company.
The Colonial Pipeline, the country’s largest gas pipeline, was also targeted in May by hackers of the Russia-based group DarkSide. The company paid $4.4 million in Bitcoin to regain access to its systems. The Justice Department later announced it recovered most of the ransom on June 7.
Putin denied the Kremlin’s involvement in those and other attacks, including the 2016 election, which U.S. intelligence officials concluded involved Russian interference.
“We have been accused of all kinds of things,” Putin told NBC News’s Keir Simmons ahead of his meeting with Biden. “Election interference, cyberattacks, and so on and so forth. And not once, not once, not one time, did they bother to produce any kind of evidence or proof. Just unfounded accusations.”
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Biden went into his recent meeting with Putin promising to discuss cyberattacks and emerged afterward saying he did so.
“I pointed out to him we have significant cyber capabilities … He doesn’t know exactly what it is, but he knows it’s significant,” Biden said afterward. “If, in fact, they violate these basic norms, we will respond … he knows, in a cyber way.”
The National Security Agency, the FBI, and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre released a joint report on Thursday that found “malicious cyber activities by Russian military intelligence against the U.S. and global organizations, starting from mid-2019 and likely ongoing.”
That report outlines a “brute force global cyber campaign” undertaken by Russian military hackers with the GRU, the same entity implicated in Robert Mueller’s special counsel report on the 2016 election.
