A threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Mandiant has been hacked and the attackers are claiming to have lurked on his computer for a year, collecting his login credentials for various sites and tracking his location.

The hackers got their hands on some internal data about the clients Mandiant and its parent company FireEye protect, including the Israeli Defense Forces. Mandiant confirmed the data breach. “We are aware of reports that a Mandiant employee’s social media accounts and personal laptop have been compromised. We are investigating this situation, and have taken steps to limit further exposure,” a FireEye spokesperson told.

The security firm of the USA has claimed that a sophisticated, Russia-based hacker group is spying on NATO and former Soviet member states, most likely on the orders of the Russian government. 

Russian cyber espionage efforts have long been considered unrivaled in skill and scope, but the difficulty of identifying attacks and tracing them to an identifiable source has prevented cyber security investigators from pinning any activity directly on a single Russian entity. But evidence of a wide-ranging cyber espionage campaign is mounting. Earlier a group of Russian hackers with suspected government backing had used a previously unknown backdoor.

A company that develops cyber security and information security products and services to defend organizations against cyber attacks and to protect critical assets has published a new report and introduced a list of countries most under threat from cyber attack.

APTs are complex attacks by hackers for which complicated techniques are used to sneak into a network and carry out prolonged information gathering attacks. They are often carried out by state-backed players or sophisticated criminals and have an element of human control, in contrast with some cyberattacks solely carried out by an automated piece of code.