A group of russian-affiliated hackers targetted a major Finnish media group.

Hacktivists from a notorious russian group Pawn Stormalso known as apt28, Sednit  and Sofacyhave attempted a cyber attack against employees of Finland's Sanoma corporation to hack into their data communications.

Another target of the same operation was Veli-Pekka Kivimäki, a Finnish activist of organisation Bellingcat, an international group of civic journalists investigating the Ukraine conflict.

Experts from a cyber security firm Trend Micro have monitored activities of Pawn Storm for about two years alreafy.

Feike Hacquebord,  Trend Micro’s Senior Threat Researcher, told a finnish magazine Yle that  the group registered a web address that differed by just one character from the address of Sanoma's genuine webmail server. He says  says the attack most likely occurred last August, and that the fake corporate webmail server operated for a few weeks before it was shut down.

CEO responsible for cyber security in Sanoma Kai Taka-Aho confirmed the attack and said that the company took it very seriously.

"In late April, we were informed by the National Cyber Security Centre Finland (NCSC-FI) of a cyber-espionage campaign aimed at targets including Sanoma. Other media outlets were also involved," he says.

Taka-Aho added that an immediate investigation was started upon the accident but "So far we have not found any evidence that the attackers succeeded or that we even received any phony messages. However we cannot completely rule this out".

He adds that Sanoma has since replaced its email system with a more secure one – something he says it would have done in any case.

According to the reports of another cyber securitycorporation Fire Eye

Pawn Storm hackers pose a serious threat for governments, political organisations and activists. Usually the hacktivists employ spear-fishing, malware and mass e-mail fishing technologies. Often the methods are combined to reach their destructive objectives.