Law enforcement has teamed up with the private sector to fight against the abuse of a legitimate security tool by criminals who were using it to infiltrate victims’ IT systems.
Older, unlicensed versions of the Cobalt Strike red teaming tool were targeted during a week of action coordinated from Europol’s headquarters between 24 and 28 June. Throughout the week, law enforcement flagged known IP addresses associated with criminal activity, along with a range of domain names used by criminal groups, for online service providers to disable unlicensed versions of the tool.
Read more…
Source: Europol
Related:
- Report: Aussie biz Azimuth cracked San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, ending Apple-FBI privacy standoff
April 14, 2021
Australian security firm Azimuth has been identified as the experts who managed to crack a mass shooter’s iPhone that was at the center of an encryption standoff between the FBI and Apple. Until this week it had largely been assumed that Israeli outfit Cellebrite was hired to forcibly unlock an encrypted iPhone 5C used by Syed ...
- FBI nuked web shells from hacked Exchange Servers without telling owners
April 13, 2021
A court-approved FBI operation was conducted to remove web shells from compromised US-based Microsoft Exchange servers without first notifying the servers’ owners. On March 2nd, Microsoft released a series of Microsoft Exchange security updates for vulnerabilities actively exploited by a hacking group known as HAFNIUM. These vulnerabilities are collectively known as ProxyLogon and were used by threat ...
- Man Arrested for AWS Bomb Plot
April 12, 2021
A Texas man has been charged with plotting a bombing of Amazon Web Services in a quest to allegedly “kill off the internet.” Seth Aaron Pendley was arrested in Ft. Worth after allegedly attempting to get an explosive device from an undercover FBI employee in a sting. The feds were alerted to Pendley after a concerned ...
- Man jailed for trying to buy chemical weapon online able to kill ‘hundreds’ of people
April 7, 2021
A man has been jailed for trying to buy a chemical weapon online capable of killing “hundreds” of people. On Tuesday, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) announced that Jason William Siesser, a resident of Missouri, will spend 12 years behind bars in federal prison without the possibility of parole. The 46-year-old tried to buy two and ...
- U.S. Special Operations Command Paid $500,000 to Secretive Location Data Firm
March 30, 2021
A section of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), a part of the military tasked with counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and special reconnaissance, paid half a million dollars to a company that sells access to location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on peoples’ phones, Motherboard has learned. Specifically, SOCOM paid Anomaly 6, a secretive contractor run by ...
- Department of Homeland Security email accounts exposed in SolarWinds hack
March 30, 2021
Email accounts belonging to US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials may have been compromised during the SolarWinds attack by Russian threat actors. The Associated Press reports that unauthorized intrusions occurred during the SolarWinds supply-chain attack. SolarWinds, the central point of entry, was compromised by threat actors in December who were able to plant a malicious Orion ...