February 20 (SeeNews) - Microsoft said on Wednesday it has detected disinformation attacks targeting accounts of employees of the German Council on Foreign Relations, The Aspen Institutes in Europe and The German Marshall Fund in several countries, including Serbia and Romania.
"The attacks against these organisations, which we are disclosing with their permission, targeted 104 accounts belonging to organization employees located in Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Serbia," Microsoft's Corporate Vice President Tom Burt said in a blog post.
The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) continues to investigate the sources of the attacks and is confident that many of them originated from a group called Strontium, Burt said.
"The attacks occurred between September and December 2018. We quickly notified each of these organizations when we discovered they were targeted so they could take steps to secure their systems, and we took a variety of technical measures to protect customers from these attacks."
The attacks, coupled with others discussed last year, suggest an ongoing effort to target democratic organisations, Burt said.
"They validate the warnings from European leaders about the threat level we should expect to see in Europe this year."
Therefore, the company is making Microsoft AccountGuard available starting today in 12 more European markets: France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovakia, and Spain.
Microsoft AccountGuard, part of the Defending Democracy Program of Microsoft, is a cybersecurity service available at no extra cost to all political candidates, parties, and campaign offices operating at a local or national level. It is also available to think tanks, non-profits, and non-governmental organisations working on issues related to democracy and electoral integrity.