France blames Sandworm, a notorious Russian group, for breach that leveraged IT provider

France’s Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information (ANSSI) issued a report detailing how attackers exploited an IT resource monitoring tool called Centreon, built by a company of the same name, to infiltrate other organizations.

While ANSSI did not specifically blame Russia, its report detailed how Sandworm, a hacking group affiliated with the Russian military agency GRU, spent three years from 2017 through 2020 hidden in some networks. The report also did not specify how attackers may have used that access, though security experts told Wired magazine that the group’s mere involvement in such an effort is enough to cause concern. Investigators previously blamed Sandworm for the 2017 NotPetya attack on Ukraine, a 2015 attack on Ukraine’s electricity grid and other destructive incidents.