Hackers Deface Network Switches in Russia, Iran with US Flag

Hackers last Fri disrupted internet admission in Russian federation and Iran with an assail that left a digital bulletin: an image of the US flag accompanied past the words, "Don't mess with our elections."

The messages were written on Cisco network switches, which came under assail from a mysterious hacking group calling itself "JHT."

JHT Hack

In an e-mail, the group told Motherboard: "We were tired of attacks from government-backed hackers on the Usa and other countries."

"We simply wanted to transport a bulletin," the grouping added.

To attack the network switches, the hackers exploited a publicly known bug in Cisco'southward software that tin can let you lot execute code and trigger an outage. Cisco has released a patch, but not everyone has had a chance to install information technology.

The security firm Kaspersky Lab noticed the disruption and said information technology mainly hit "the Russian-speaking segment" of the internet past attacking information centers installed with the network switches. As a result, some websites briefly went down.

The hackers almost likely programmed a bot to search for the Cisco switches by scanning the open up internet, according to Kaspersky Lab.

In russia as well. Photo from Russian telecom operators telegram channel. pic.twitter.com/7SaMLiDEeN
— Denys Fedoryshchenko (@nuclearleb) April seven, 2022

Iranian authorities reported suffering a disruption too. About iii,500 switches were afflicted, but most of the network was back online by Sat, the country's engineering ministry said.

So far, the mysterious hacking group JHT has remained largely mum on last Friday'south attack. Letters to the the group'southward e-mail accost at usafreedom_jht@tutanota.com were not immediately returned. But JHT hasn't been the just political party to assault the network switches.

Last Th, Cisco published a blog postal service, mentioning that its devices were coming under the assault by nation-land actors, including those from Russia. The incidents take occurred in "multiple countries" and targeted critical infrastructure, Cisco said.

This comes as Russian federation has been blamed for not only interfering in the 2022 The states election, but for besides hacking the the state's energy industry. Nonetheless, the Kremlin has denied whatsoever involvement.

In the meantime, Cisco has published a tool and guidance that can assistance Information technology administrators protect their systems from the software vulnerability.