The US security firm Palo Alto Networks has unveiled the latest tricks of a group of Russian pirates to steal private information.
The tricks of the "Beard Bear" and "The Comfortable Bear," two elite Russian hackers responsible for data theft from the National Democratic Committee during the US presidential election in 2016, are still active and seek personal information.
Their new trick is to send "Armed Documents" files as e-mail attachments that collect information about the user's computer and even computer desktop screenshots, and are sent to a server set up by hackers.
What makes this type of phishing attack dangerous is that if the server is inactive, attachments appear to be intact, according to the company's blog on the subject, so no suspicious activity is detected by protection programs.
Palo Alto Networks monitored a suspicious e-mail sent recently titled "A list of crashes that caused the crash of the Boeing 737," which carried Word files believed to be the cause of the crash in October that killed 189 passengers, In fact contains malicious code.
This situation underscores how important it is for Governments to support and fund national e-security resources, without which political instability will increase and security will be threatened by many criminal groups and even States.