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Russian intelligence officers have been accused of launching cyber attacks on the global chemical weapons watchdog investigating the Salisbury nerve agent attack.
Officials in the Netherlands, where the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is based, said the Russian GRU used two different methods to attempt to carry out cyber attacks on several targets – known as close access and spear phishing.
Dutch authorities said four GRU officers parked a car carrying specialist hacking equipment outside the headquarters of the OPCW in The Hague in an attempted close access attack.
This method involves hackers attempting to breach a network by getting physically close to it.
In this case, officials said the GRU officers were trying to hack into the OPCW’s systems via its WiFi network.
Close access attacks can also be used when intruders wish to appear as insiders when accessing a network, using compromised credentials but without raising suspicion.
The attempt on the OPCW headquarters followed unsuccessful “spear phishing” attacks by the GRU on the UK Foreign Office and on the defence laboratories at Porton Down, which was investigating the Salisbury poisoning incident.
Spear phishing is a method similar to the common phishing attacks deployed by hackers, in which blanket malicious emails are sent to people asking them for sensitive information such as bank details or encouraging them to visit a fake website, which then downloads malware to their computer.
Whereas phishing attacks tend to be broad in scale with emails sent to individuals indiscriminately, a spear phishing attack is purposely targeted at individuals or an organisation to gain access to their network.
