Thousands of passwords from computer accounts belonging to British officials and law enforcement agencies are on the lists that cybercriminals are offering for sale on specialized sites, writes the Times newspaper referring to its own investigation. Such a business was arranged by hackers who took possession of e-mail addresses and owned ministers, ambassadors, and high-ranking policemen.
Who turned out to be in danger
The sale and exchange of logins and passwords, allegedly owned by British politicians and officials, is conducted on one of the Russian-language sites for hackers.
This is reported on Friday by the Times.
Based on the fact that the lists are posted on Russian-language Internet forums, the newspaper concludes that Russian hackers may be involved in the cyber season.
According to the publication, two large lists of stolen data include the information relating to the order of thousands of British parliamentarians and their assistants, 7,000 police officers and more than 1,000 officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
According to the publication, cyber criminals managed to seize e-mail addresses and passwords belonging to employees of the British foreign policy department, parliamentarians and representatives of law enforcement agencies.
The main reason for hackers' success
Although the main body of data has been stolen from sites such as LinkedIn and MySpace, cyber security experts warn of the danger of malicious users entering government networks whose passwords may coincide with those stolen in social networks.
The newspaper notes the unreliability of passwords used by British Officials, including high-ranking security officials.
Particularly, the lists include the data of the chief police inspector Andy Redwood. According to the TASS news agency, Greg Clark, the minister for business, energy and industrial strategy, among those users whose data was "merged" into the Internet, as well as the minister of education Justine Greening.
The most popular passwords for British police, according to the lists, are "police", "password" and "police1".
These passwords, most likely, are suitable for office resources, according to "Economics Today".
Experts on cyber security warn of the danger of penetration of intruders into government networks.It is reported that the investigation materials have been transferred to the National Center for Cybersecurity (NCSC), where they have already announced that, after getting acquainted with them, they will develop a new guide for data protection for government agencies.
Earlier it was reported to the "Federal News Agency." That hackers learned to monitor users through the webcams of their computers. Monitoring software was developed in China.
In February, the British edition of The Financial Times reported that the hacker group APT28, which, according to experts on cyber security, is a division of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Federation, has been active for at least ten years and managed to harm the most vulnerable and important military and Diplomatic organizations in the West.
