Affiliations
- Also known as Voodoo Bear, APT44, BlackEnergy, Seashell Blizzard and Electrum. Affiliated with online cyber activist personas "XAKNET," "Cyber Army of Russia Reborn," "Solntsepek." Believed to be responsible for the 2008 DDoS attacks in Georgia and the 2015 Ukraine power grid outage. Code used by this threat actor was also found in the alleged Russian compromise of networking equipment. There is possible overlap between Black Energy and the threat actor behind the compromise of the 2018 Winter Olympics.
This threat actor targets industrial control systems, using a tool called Black Energy, associated with electricity and power generation for espionage, denial of service, and data destruction purposes. Some believe that the threat actor is linked to the 2015 compromise of the Ukrainian electrical grid and a distributed denial of service prior to the Russian invasion of Georgia. In 2018, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency released a technical alert about this threat actor, and the United Kingdom attributed the actor to Russian military intelligence.In May 2020, the NSA publicly accused the group of targeting email servers worldwide.Sandworm is associated with Telegram accounts which have taken credit for sabotage attacks on critical infrastructure (water facilities) in Poland, the U.S., and France.
Suspected victims
- Russia
- Lithuania
- Kyrgyzstan
- Israel
- France
- Ukraine
- Belarus
- Kazakhstan
- Georgia
- Poland
- Azerbaijan
- Iran
- United States
Suspected state sponsor
- Russian Federation
Type of incident
- Espionage
Target category
- Private sector
- Government
Read more
- BE2 custom plugins, router abuse, and target profiles
- Sandworm Team and the Ukrainian Power Authority Attacks
- Russian Sandwork Hack has been spying on foreign governments for years
- BfV Cyber-Brief Nr. 02/2018
- Electrum
- Exim Mail Transfer Agent Actively Exploited by Russian GRU Cyber Actors
- Unearthing APT 44
- Cyber Army of Russia Reborn Claims Credit for Sabotaging US Water Utilities
- Russian Sandworm hackers pose as hacktivists