Dick O'Brien

And that's a much more meaningful connection than simply observing that Russia continues to conduct cyberattacks.

Dick O'Brien, a principal intelligence analyst with Symantec Threat Hunter team, told Cyberscoop that the human-directed activity demonstrated the shipbuilder was a genuine target rather than an accidental infection.

The attackers weren't simply distributing malware and hoping something useful would happen.

Investigators observed operators actively exploiting access to a particular organization, and that raises the question of what intelligence requirements may have been driving the operation.