Spies hack Wi-Fi networks in far-off land to launch attack on target next door

One of 2024's coolest hacking tales occurred two years ago, but it wasn't revealed to the public until Friday at the Cyberwarcon conference in Arlington, Virginia. Hackers with ties to Fancy Bear—the spy agency operated by Russia’s GRU—broke into the network of a high-value target after first compromising a Wi-Fi-enabled device in a nearby building and using it to exploit compromised accounts on the target’s Wi-Fi network.

The attack, from a group security firm Volexity calls GruesomeLarch, shows the boundless lengths well-resourced hackers will take to hack high-value targets, presumably only after earlier hack attempts haven’t worked. When the GruesomeLarch cabal couldn’t get into the target network using easier methods, they hacked a Wi-Fi-enabled device in a nearby building and used it to breach the target’s network next door. After the first neighbor’s network was disinfected, the hackers successfully performed the same attack on a device of a second neighbor.

Too close for comfort

“This is a fascinating attack where a foreign adversary essentially conducted a close access operation while being physically quite far away,” Steven Adair, a researcher and the president of Volexity, wrote in an email. “They were able to launch an attack that historically had required being in close proximity to the target but found a way to conduct it in a way which completely eliminated the risk of them being caught in the real world.”

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