- MP Says Austria Unprepared After Cyberattack on Foreign Ministry
January 7, 2020
The Austrian State Department’s IT systems were under a ‘serious attack’ suspected to be carried out by a state-backed threat group according to a joint statement from the Foreign Ministry (BMEIA) and the Ministry of the Interior (BMI). “A coordination committee has been set up on the basis of the Network and Information System Security Act, and ...
- New Year Honours: Government faces multi-million pound compensation bill over leaked private details
December 29, 2019
The Government is facing fines and a compensation bill running into millions of pounds after the disclosure of the home addresses of counter-terrorism experts, senior police officers and celebrities on the new year honours list. Senior figures demanded an exhaustive inquiry into the circumstances which led to the personal details of more than 1,000 individuals who will ...
- More than a Dozen Obfuscated APT33 Botnets Used for Extreme Narrow Targeting
December 12, 2019
The threat group regularly referred to as APT33 is known to target the oil and aviation industries aggressively. This threat group has been reported on consistently for years, but our recent findings show that the group has been using about a dozen live Command and Control (C&C) servers for extremely narrow targeting. The group puts up multiple layers of obfuscation to ...
- Cyber security takes its place alongside UK’s armed services
December 6, 2019
The pervasiveness of information and the pace of technological change are utterly transforming the character of warfare in the 21st Century, and the cyber security industry has earned a seat at the table alongside the army, navy and air force, according to General Sir Nick Carter, chief of the defence staff. Carter, who served in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Afghanistan ...
- AWS is challenging Microsoft’s $10 billion JEDI contract win
November 14, 2019
It’s not surprising, but as of today, November 14, it is official: Amazon AWS is protesting the U.S. Department of Defense’s award of its $10 billion cloud contract to Microsoft. AWS made the company’s decision to file paperwork to challenge the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) public inside the company during an all-hands meeting on November ...
- APT33 Mounts Focused, Highly Targeted Botnet Attacks Against U.S. Victims
November 14, 2019
The Iran-linked, espionage-focused advanced threat group known as APT33 has been spotted using more than a dozen obfuscated botnets to carry out narrowly targeted attacks against government and academic targets in the Middle East, the U.S. and Asia. Each botnet, linked to its own command-and-control (C2) server, comprises a small group of up to a dozen ...
- Open database leaked 179GB in customer, US government, and military records
October 21, 2019
An open database exposing records containing the sensitive data of hotel customers as well as US military personnel and officials has been disclosed by researchers. On Monday, vpnMentor’s cybersecurity team, led by Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, said the database belonged to Autoclerk, a service owned by Best Western Hotels and Resorts group. Autoclerk is a reservations management system used ...
- Malware infection disrupts production at defence contractor plants in three countries
September 27, 2019
One of the biggest defence contractors in the world is having a very bad week after malware infected the company’s network and caused “significant disruption” at plants in three countries, the company said on Thursday. The infection took root on Tuesday, September 24, and affected Rheinmetall AG, a German corporation based in Düsseldorf, and one of ...
- A cyber-espionage group has been stealing files from the Venezuelan military
August 5, 2019
A cyber-espionage group known as “Machete” has been observed stealing sensitive files from the Venezuelan military, according to an ESET report published today. The group, known to have been active since 2010, has historically gone after a wide range of targets from all over the world. However, ESET said that starting with this year, Machete has ...
- NSA to establish a defense-minded division named the Cybersecurity Directorate
July 23, 2019
The National Security Agency announced today plans to establish a new defense-minded cyber-security division that will focus on defending the US against foreign cyber-threats. This new division, which will be named the Cybersecurity Directorate, will become operational on October 1, later this year. Anne Neuberger will be the division’s first Director of Cybersecurity. She will report directly ...
- French army will employ sci-fi writers to predict cyber threats
July 22, 2019
The French military is to assemble a team of science fiction writers to imagine possible future cyber threats and inject innovation into cyber defence. This will be a small group, known as the “Red Team” which will be comprised of four or five science fiction writers and or futurists. The team will be hired to “propose ...
- Cyberwarfare in space: Satellites at risk of hacker attacks
July 2, 2019
There’s an urgent need for NATO and its member countries to address the cybersecurity of space-based satellite control systems because they’re vulnerable to cyberattacks – and if left unaddressed, it could have severe consequences for global security, a new paper from a major thinktank on international affairs has warned. Almost all modern military engagements rely on space-based assets, ...
- Germany and the Netherlands to build the first ever joint military internet
June 28, 2019
Government officials from Germany and the Netherlands have signed an agreement this week to build the first-ever joint military internet. The accord was signed on Wednesday in Brussels, Belgium, where NATO defense ministers met this week. The name of this new Dutch-German military internet is the Tactical Edge Networking, or TEN, for short. This is the first time ...
- US launches cyber-attack aimed at Iranian rocket and missile systems
June 24, 2019
The US has responded to a recent rise in Iranian cyber-activity and the shooting of an unarmed drone last week by launching cyber-attacks against Iran’s military IT systems. The cyber-attacks were carried out by US Cyber Command with the direct approval of US President Donald Trump, the Associated Press reported on Sunday, citing two inside sources, and ...
- Russian military moves closer to replacing Windows with Astra Linux
May 30, 2019
Russian authorities have moved closer to implementing their plan of replacing the Windows OS on military systems with a locally-developed operating system named Astra Linux. Last month, the Russian Federal Service for Technical and Export Control (FSTEC) granted Astra Linux the security clearance of “special importance,” which means the OS can now be used to handle Russian ...
- This malware campaign is targeting the military with phony emails from a defence contractor
April 16, 2019
The Ukrainian government and military is being targeted with spear-phishing attacks as part of a cyber-espionage operation based around dropping powerful malware. These phishing attacks have been detailed by researchers at cybersecurity firm FireEye, who identified malicious emails being sent to Ukrainian military departments in January this year. The malware is being sent, presumably, with the aim of monitoring ...
- NASA’s crap infosec could be ‘significant threat’ to space ops
March 11, 2019
NASA’s Office of the Inspector General has once again concluded the American space agency’s tech security practices are “not consistently implemented”. Confirmation that the US government department’s infosec abilities are not up to scratch was a repeat of last year’s federally mandated security audit, which also found that processes and procedures were below par. Oversight personnel from ...
- Citrix Data Breach – Iranian Hackers Stole 6TB of Sensitive Data
March 11, 2019
Popular enterprise software company Citrix that provides services to the U.S. military, the FBI, many U.S. corporations, and various U.S. government agencies disclosed last weekend a massive data breach of its internal network by “international cyber criminals.” Citrix said it was warned by the FBI on Wednesday of foreign hackers compromising its IT systems and stealing ...
- Researchers Link ‘Sharpshooter’ Cyber Attacks to North Korean Hackers
March 4, 2019
Security researchers have finally, with “high confidence,” linked a previously discovered global cyber espionage campaign targeting critical infrastructure around the world to a North Korean APT hacking group. Thanks to the new evidence collected by researchers after analyzing a command-and-control (C2) server involved in the espionage campaign and seized by law enforcement. Dubbed Operation Sharpshooter, the cyber espionage ...
- Senior Defence figure raises concerns about future cyber attacks
February 19, 2019
One of Australia’s senior military figures says the threat of cyber attacks against the nation’s infrastructure and military networks is on the rise. Major General Marcus Thompson leads the Information Warfare Division, which was set up in mid-2017 with the aim of providing both defensive and offensive cyber capabilities. In his first media major interview, he told ...