U.S. Military Operation in Venezuela: Cyber Threat Assessment
At this time, there is no strong evidence to suggest an increased cyber threat directly related to this weekend’s U.S. military operation in Venezuela. However, given the unusually high geopolitical visibility of the event, organizations should stay vigilant for potential threat landscape shifts and possible opportunistic activity, and maintain defensive readiness should follow-on cyber threats emerge.
Historical public reporting offers limited evidence of state-sponsored Venezuelan cyber operations, and domestic instability & economic constraints in the country further reduce expectations of a sophisticated, government-directed cyber response. Past hacktivist activity has been tied to Venezuela, although it has mainly been linked to groups aligned with the political opposition, and reporting on this activity is largely dated.
We are updating the Tidal Cyber knowledge base with some of these campaigns for users’ context, however.
A more likely – although still not certain – threat comes from potential spillover activity linked to external hacktivists.
As we highlighted in last month’s Annual Report, hacktivist groups are increasingly active during times of geopolitical tension and often threaten a wide range of entities – both government & enterprise – perceived as supporting their targets’ interests. Given Venezuela’s historical alignment with countries including Russia and Iran, we assess (with low confidence) that organizations may face threats from hacktivists aligned with those regimes in the near term, with actors prioritizing targeting of “low-hanging fruit” like exposed/vulnerable systems or weakly secured (e.g. default credentials) access points.
The U.S. government recently warned about opportunistic, pro-Russia hacktivist activity threatening critical infrastructure and other sectors – related content can be found in our knowledge base here.