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On Friday, representatives of the notorious hacking entity known as Fancy Bear failed to appear in a federal court in Virginia to defend themselves against a civil lawsuit brought by Microsoft.
As the Daily Beast first reported on Friday, Microsoft has been waging a quiet battle in court against the threat group, which is believed to be affiliated with the GRU, Russia's foreign intelligence agency. For now, the company has managed to seize control of 70 domain names, but it's going after many more.
The idea of the lawsuit, which was filed in August 2016, is to use various federal laws—including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), and American trademark law—as a way to seize command-and-control domain names used by the group, which goes by various monikers, including APT28 and Strontium. Many of the domain names used by Fancy Bear contain Microsoft trademarks, like microsoftinfo365.com and hundreds of others.
In June 2017, Microsoft asked the judge to issue a default judgement in its favor, since the individuals behind Fancy Bear have not made themselves known. According to the Daily Beast, Microsoft and its lawyers have made several attempts to serve the unknown "John Does" via e-mail. According to the Daily Beast, those e-mails have been opened dozens of times and were equipped with a tracking beacon. Microsoft's lawyers have also conveniently posted all the court documents on a public website, inviting the defendants to contact them via postal mail, e-mail, or even fax.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 27 2017, @07:51AM
This sentence is almost self contradictory. So we have some super elite state organized cyber espionage group... that autoloads images in their emails (which is the only viable means of setting an email "tracking beacon"). These red scare orientated 'evil hacker' stories rarely make any sense at all. Tracking these people invariably involves the alleged hackers engage in less precautions than a security conscious regular user engages in. It's just all so contradictory. The stories don't really make any logical sense. Said "tracking beacon" could also have been accessed in countless other ways that don't involve these individuals having received their summons. Meh, I want a technocracy.