- New Zealand: Money-motivated cyber attacks outnumber those carried out by nation-states
November 2, 2023
Major financially motivated cyber attacks in New Zealand have exceeded those launched by nation-states for the first time, and AI looms as an ever-greater weapon, a new report says. In its latest annual threat report, the National Cyber Security Centre said the potential impact was growing – though the number of major attacks dropped slightly, to ...
- Do government sanctions against ransomware groups work?
November 2, 2023
Earlier this year, the U.S. government imposed sanctions against Russian national Mikhail Matveev, an FBI most-wanted cybercriminal, who authorities accuse of being a “prolific ransomware affiliate” involved in cyberattacks in the United States and overseas. Authorities say Matveev played a major role in the development and deployment of the Hive, LockBit and Babuk ransomware variants, ...
- Forty Countries Agree Not to Pay Cybercrime Ransoms
November 1, 2023
Dozens of US allies have signed an agreement never to pay digital extortionists, in a sign of the growing impact ransomware is having on their national security and economies. The pledge was made at the second annual meeting of the International Counter Ransomware Initiative and reported by attendant media, although there is no official word yet ...
- Ransomware gang HelloKitty exploits critical Apache ActiveMQ bug CVE-2023-46604
November 1, 2023
Beginning Friday, October 27, Rapid7 Managed Detection and Response (MDR) identified suspected exploitation of Apache ActiveMQ CVE-2023-46604 in two different customer environments. In both instances, the adversary attempted to deploy ransomware binaries on target systems in an effort to ransom the victim organizations. Based on the ransom note and available evidence, we attribute the activity to ...
- Investigation of Session Hijacking via Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway Vulnerability (CVE-2023-4966)
October 31, 2023
On Oct. 10, 2023, Citrix released a security bulletin for a sensitive information disclosure vulnerability (CVE-2023-4966) impacting NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway appliances. Mandiant has identified zero-day exploitation of this vulnerability in the wild beginning in late August 2023 as well as n-day exploitation after Citrix’s publication. Mandiant is investigating multiple instances of successful exploitation of ...
- British Library suffering major technology outage after cyber-attack
October 31, 2023
The British Library is suffering a technology outage after it was hit by a cyber-attack, which is affecting services online and its sites in London and Yorkshire. Access to the website, as well as the catalogue and digital collections, is temporarily unavailable. The collection of items ordered on or after 27 October, new collection item orders ...
- India: What you need to know about the Apple and Aadhaar attacks
October 31, 2023
October 31 was a big day for data protection, privacy and surveillance. First, reports poured in about a massive breach of Aadhaar information, with estimates that the data of 815 million Indians had been put up for sale on the ‘dark web’. Soon after, many opposition leaders and civil society members began sharing messages they ...
- Step-by-step through the Money Message ransomware
October 30, 2023
In August 2023, the Sophos X-Ops Incident Response team was engaged to support an organization in Australia infected with Money Message ransomware. This attack vector, known for its stealth, does not append any file extensions to the encrypted data, making it harder for victims to identify the encrypted files simply by spotting such extensions. In ...
- CloudKeys in the Air: Tracking Malicious Operations of Exposed IAM Keys
October 30, 2023
Unit 42 researchers have identified an active campaign we are calling EleKtra-Leak, which performs automated targeting of exposed identity and access management (IAM) credentials within public GitHub repositories. As a result of this, the threat actor associated with the campaign was able to create multiple AWS Elastic Compute (EC2) instances that they used for wide-ranging ...
- TA571 Delivers IcedID Forked Loader
October 30, 2023
Proofpoint researchers identified TA571 delivering the Forked variant of IcedID in two campaigns on 11 and 18 October 2023. Both campaigns included over 6,000 messages, each impacting over 1,200 customers in a variety of industries globally. Emails in the campaigns purported to be replies to existing threads. This is known as thread hijacking. The emails contained ...