From cause to cash: a cross-border look at hacktivist activity


While tracking the activities of 4BID Kaspersky researchers uncovered a new string of campaigns that appear to be the work of several interconnected actors. While politically motivated groups generally limit their scope to specific nations – for 4BID and its peers, primarily Russian and occasionally Belarusian organizations – the latest findings reveal a shift. The actual geographic footprint of these attacks became broader than expected, striking companies across Kazakhstan, the UAE, Syria, and Egypt.

What triggered Kaspersky’s investigation was spotting a cluster of indicators of compromise within a breached Russian organization’s infrastructure. The researchers used these footprints to successfully track down other environments hit by the same threat actors and piece together the bigger picture.

Read more…
Source:  Kaspersky


Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox


Related:

  • Cybercrooks home in on infosec’s weakest link – you poor gullible people

    September 5, 2018

    Cybercrims are ramping up their efforts to target employees through fraudulent email and social media scams, according to a new study by email security firm Proofpoint. Retailers and government agencies saw huge quarter-on-quarter increases in email fraud attempts in calendar Q2, with attacks per company and agency soaring 91 per cent and 84 per cent respectively. ...

  • Recent Windows ALPC zero-day has been exploited in the wild for almost a week

    September 5, 2018

    Two days after a security researcher released details and proof-of-concept code about an unpatched Windows zero-day, one malware group had already incorporated the vulnerability in their exploit chain and was attempting to infect users around the globe. The zero-day used in this malware distribution campaign is a (still-unpatched) vulnerability in the Windows Task Scheduler feature, affecting ...

  • OilRig Sends an OopsIE to Mideast Government Targets

    September 5, 2018

    The Iran-linked group is using a variant of the data-exfiltration OopsIE trojan to attack a Mideast government entity. The OilRig group is back, using a reboot of the OopsIE trojan to pump information from its favorite resource: entities in the Middle East region. OilRig, which is also called Cobalt Gypsy, Crambus, Helix Kitten or PT34, is suspected ...

  • FIN6 returns to attack retailer point of sale systems in US, Europe

    September 5, 2018

    A new malware campaign has been detected which is targeting point-of-sale (PoS) systems across the United States and Europe. On Wednesday, researchers from IBM X-Force IRIS said the attacks have been attributed to the FIN6 cybercriminal group. This is only the second time that a campaign has been documented which appears to be the handiwork of FIN6. According to FireEye (.PDF), ...

  • New Silence hacking group suspected of having ties to cyber-security industry

    September 5, 2018

    At least one member of a newly uncovered cybercrime hacking group appears to be a former or current employee of a cyber-security company, according to a new report released today. The report, published by Moscow-based cyber-security firm Group-IB, breaks down the activity of a previously unreported cyber-criminal group named Silence. According to Group-IB, the group has spent the ...

  • Cybersecurity researchers double SCADA vulnerability finds

    September 3, 2018

    Independent cybersecurity researchers found nearly double the number of vulnerabilities in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems in the first six months of 2018 as they did in the first half of 2017, according to a new report by Japanese multinational Trend Micro, amid rising concerns about infrastructure security. The 202 holes spotted in such ...