Europol coordinates global action against criminal abuse of Cobalt Strike


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


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • U.S. Charges Chinese Military Officers in 2017 Equifax Hacking

    February 10, 2020

    Four members of China’s military were charged on Monday with hacking into Equifax, one of the nation’s largest credit reporting agencies, and stealing trade secrets and the personal data of about 145 million Americans in 2017. The charges underscored China’s quest to obtain Americans’ data and its willingness to flout a 2015 agreement with the United States to refrain from ...

  • Federal Agencies Use Cellphone Location Data for Immigration Enforcement

    February 7, 2020

    The Trump administration has bought access to a commercial database that maps the movements of millions of cellphones in America and is using it for immigration and border enforcement, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The location data is drawn from ordinary cellphone apps, including those for ...

  • FBI launches investigation into Pegasus spyware vendor over US citizen hacks

    January 31, 2020

    The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has launched an investigation into NSO Group based on suspicions that US residents and companies may have been compromised for intelligence-gathering purposes. According to the Reuters news agency, investigators began examining NSO in 2017 during an inquiry into whether US hackers had provided the code necessary for the company to ...

  • Burn, drown, or smash your phone: Forensics can extract data anyway

    January 31, 2020

    Damaged mobile phones are still filled with plenty of useful data, according to researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. NIST published the results of a recent study on forensic methods for getting data from mobile damaged mobile phones. It tested the tools that ...

  • UK’s HMRC tax authority seeks tools to track down cryptocurrency criminals

    January 31, 2020

    The UK’s Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) tax collection agency is asking for a blockchain analytics tool useful in the hunt for cybercriminals — and perhaps asset tax avoiders. In a project request posted last week, HMRC asked bidders to provide a tool that “will support intelligence-gathering methods to identify and cluster cryptoasset transactions into linked ...

  • Crime Cracking Technologies for the Dark Web

    January 19, 2020

    Anonymity is the real currency of the digital dark side and not just for the criminals. Organizations such as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) J-CODE, Europol’s EC3, the German Federal Criminal Police, La Police Nationale Française, and many others invest significant amounts of time and cash into technologies and methodologies used to break ...