Summary
Organisations in critical infrastructure sectors are being supported to better understand and defend against malicious activity, as the UK and international partners today call out techniques used by Russian Intelligence Services Alongside 18 agencies from 12 countries, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) – a part of GCHQ – has published a new advisory highlighting the methods of Federal Security Service (FSB) Centre 16 cyber actors, who are exploiting vulnerable routers and opportunistically targeting networks belonging to critical national infrastructure (CNI) globally. Sectors most at risk from this global targeting, including communications, defence, energy, financial services, government and healthcare, are subsequently being urged to take action. This includes recommendations to use SNMPv3 and disable legacy SNMP versions, implement strong and unique passwords for network devices, and restrict access to management protocols through appropriate access controls. Centre 16, also known as Berserk Bear, Energetic Bear, Crouching Yeti, Dragonfly, Ghost Blizzard and Static Tundra, has been seen hunting for vulnerable routers by scanning the internet for devices that still use default or weak Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) passwords and community strings.