Microsoft update on nation-state actor issued

Microsoft on Sunday posted an update on the latest activity by Nobelium, a Russian nation-state actor behind cyberattacks on SolarWinds customers in 2020.

“This recent activity is another indicator that Russia is trying to gain long-term, systematic access to a variety of points in the technology supply chain and establish a mechanism for surveilling — now or in the future — targets of interest to the Russian government,” the blog post states. 

John Riggi, AHA senior advisor for cybersecurity and risk, said, “The Nobelium threat group, which according to the U.S. government was responsible for the broad supply chain attack leveraging the SolarWinds platform, is now attacking a different part of the supply chain: resellers and other technology service providers that customize, deploy and manage cloud services and other technologies on behalf of their customers. This threat highlights the need for hospitals and health systems to have robust third-party risk management programs that carefully evaluate the cyber risk their organizations could be exposed to through their technology supply chains and services, should those supply chains and services be compromised. These risks are potentially strategic in nature and have national security, business and care delivery implications that go far beyond the protection and privacy of protected health information.”

For more information on this or other cyber and risk issues, contact Riggi at jriggi@aha.org.