Space Pirates (hacker group)

History

2023: Attacks on the public sector, aviation and rocket and space industry of Russia

The hacker group Space Pirates attacks the public sector, the aviation and rocket and space industry in Russia. This was announced on July 17, 2023 by specialists from the Positive Technologies Security Center (PT Expert Security Center, PT ESC).

According to them, criminals known for the scale of their actions have developed new tools and increased the number of attempts to attack organizations and enterprises representing key sectors of the Russian economy. According to the PT ESC investigation, the results of which were released in July 2023, Space Pirates has launched successful attacks on at least 16 organizations in Russia over the past year. The main targets of attackers are still espionage and theft of confidential information.

However, the group has expanded its scope of interests. Among the new victims, experts single out state, educational institutions, a security organization, enterprises of the aviation, rocket and space and agricultural industries, military-industrial and fuel and energy complexes, as well as information security companies. The victim of Space Pirates was also one ministry in Serbia.

As Denis Kuvshinov, head of the cyber threat research department at the Positive Technologies security expert center, noted, the group's tactics have practically not changed, but it has developed new tools that implement non-standard techniques (such as Voidoor) and improved the old ones. On one of the control servers of Space Pirates, experts discovered the Acunetix scanner: this indicates a likely vector of attack through exploitation of vulnerabilities, he said. According to the expert, in order to protect against threats associated with the activities of the group, it is recommended to take proactive measures, use sandboxes that allow you to identify even complex virus software, and traffic analyzers.