Instead of venturing into radio range of their target, they found another vulnerable network in a building across the street, remotely hacked into a laptop in that neighboring building, and used that computer's antenna to break into the Wi-Fi network of their intended victim—a radio-hacking trick that never even required leaving Russian soil. //

In this newly revealed case from early 2022, Volexity ultimately discovered not only that the Russian hackers had jumped to the target network via Wi-Fi from a different compromised network across the street, but also that this prior breach had also potentially been carried out over Wi-Fi from yet another network in the same building—a kind of “daisy-chaining” of network breaches via Wi-Fi, as Adair describes it.

“This is the first case we’ve worked where you have an attacker that’s extremely far away and essentially broke into other organizations in the US in physical proximity to the intended target, then pivoted over Wi-Fi to get into the target network across the street,” says Adair. “That’s a really interesting attack vector that we haven’t seen before.”. //

The switch to hacking via Wi-Fi from a remotely compromised device rather than physically placing a spy nearby represents a logical next step following the GRU's operational security disaster in 2018, when its hackers were caught in a car in The Hague attempting to hack the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in response to the OPCW's investigation of the attempted assassination of GRU defector Sergei Skripal. In that incident, the APT28 team was arrested and their devices were seized, revealing their travel around the world from Brazil to Malaysia to carry out similar close-access attacks.

“If a target is important enough, they’re willing to send people in person. But you don’t have to do that if you can come up with an alternative like what we’re seeing here,” Hultquist says. “This is potentially a major improvement for those operations, and it’s something we’ll probably see more of—if we haven’t already.”