News agency tied to Russia's ‘troll factory’ says it was targeted in last November's ‘failed’ cyberattack by the U.S. military

Federal News Agency (FAN) — a media outlet that journalists have tied to catering tycoon Evgeny Prigozhin and his infamous “troll factory” in St. Petersburg — confirms that the U.S. military targeted its servers in a cyberattack.

According to FAN, a cyberattack on November 5, 2018, disabled two of its internal office server’s four hard drives, and also erased the data stored on servers the publication leases in Sweden and Estonia. FAN says it remained online despite the outages, calling the cyberattack a “complete failure.”

In a public statement, FAN said the U.S. military gained access to its intranet through an infected iPhone that an employee unknowingly connected to his computer.

It is worth noting that the intrusion into the local network was carried out from IP addresses controlled by American companies, including Amazon servers that are usually used by hackers to cover their tracks and conceal the true source of an attack. In this way, the U.S. Armed Forces Cyber Command exploited its administrative capacity and used a commercial enterprise for its own interests.

On February 26, The Washington Post reported that “the U.S. military blocked Internet access to an infamous Russian entity seeking to sow discord among Americans during the 2018 midterms,” calling it “a warning that the Kremlin’s operations against the United States are not cost-free.”