Open Vienna

The headquarters of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was subjected to a massive hacker attack. It is reported by Le Monde with reference to its own sources.

Officially, the OSCE refuses to make any assumptions about who can stand behind hackers. However, as a source in the Western intelligence services told the publication, the attack was most likely by the participants of the Russian APT28 group, also known as Pawn Storm, Sofacy or Fancy Bear.

The OSCE is suspected that attackers gained access to e -mail, passwords and some electronic dossiers of employees of the organization. “It seems that this happened at the end of October,” Natasha Rayakovich, spokeswoman for theove Organization, told the publication. She did not reveal the details of what happened.

The leadership of the headquarters in Vienna informed about the attack of all 57 member states of the OSCE, but did not give this fact to public publicity.

According to Le Monde, the OSCE plays an important role in resolving the conflict in eastern Ukraine. However, according to the experts surveyed by the publication, the true goal of this attack may be German authorities. Next year, Germany will be held in Germany, which Chancellor Angela Merkel expects to win. At the same time, in the Kremlin it is seen as a "last obstacle" on the path to lifting sanctions from Russia.

On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that the Barack Obama administration intends to introduce new economic sanctions against Russiain response to cyber attacks during presidential elections in the United States . According to the sources of the publication, we can talk about both economic sanctions and measures at the diplomatic level, as well as operations in cyberspace, including secret ones.

According to the American media, over the past four months in Washington, several options for a response to Russian cyber attacks have been considered, but they were all rejected as ineffective or too risky. One of the options suggested revealing Vladimir Putin's connections with oligarchs. However, a number of Obama’s assistants rejected this idea, explaining that such exposure would not become a shock for the Russians.