UK Media Accusing Russia Of Cyber Attacks Falsely Interpret NCSC, NSA Report - Embassy

LONDON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 25th October, 2019) The UK media, which accused Russian hackers of trying to attack government, military and research organizations' resources in 35 countries for intelligence purposes, incorrectly reflected on the joint report made by the UK National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) and the US National Security Agency (NSA), a spokesman for the Russian Embassy said Thursday.

"These publications are an unscrupulous interpretation of the brief report of the UK National Cyber Security Center and the US National Security Agency. The secret services themselves do not make any accusations against Russia and Russian citizens. It is only about the 'suspicions' that the 'Turla' hacking group 'is based on the territory' of our country," the embassy explained.

According to the Russian diplomatic mission's spokesman, it is puzzling that the authors of the report published on Monday filled the document with numerous technical details regarding the methods of carrying out cyber attacks, but did not indicate which organizations and which countries suffered from those actions.

"It is only asserted that the Iranian infrastructure was allegedly used to carry out the attacks, and this fact is again unscrupulously used by the media to try to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran," the Russian embassy said.

The spokesman stressed that the Russian side has repeatedly called on its UK colleagues to hold talks on the cyber security concerns, however, no response was ever received.

Earlier this week, NCSC claimed that the Turla group, which is said to be be associated with Russia, used the Neuron and Nautilus malicious tools and the Snake toolkit to gain and compromise network access for the purpose of gathering intelligence through Iran's APT � the state-sponsored advanced persistent threat computer network.

The Turla group allegedly targeted microsoft Windows platforms through primarily mail and web servers to gain access to the network and collected intelligence from government, military, technology, energy and commercial organizations, located primarily in the middle East, the report said.

Due to the nature of Turla's targeting tools, victims of the attack traced it back to the Iranian network.

However, the report did not provide any hard evidence of its claims that Russian hackers had used Iranian networks to stage attacks.

Russia has been accused by Western states of hacking government structures on multiple occasions, allegations which Moscow vehemently denies.