Government

May 6, 2024

The German ambassador to Russia was recalled for consultations on Monday after Berlin accused Moscow of carrying out cyberattacks. A newly concluded government investigation found the cyberattack had been carried out by a group — linked to Moscow’s GRU military intelligence agency — known as APT28. The group, also known as Fancy Bear, has been accused ...

May 5, 2024

Israel’s cabinet on Sunday voted unanimously to shut down the Qatari news outlet Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, nearly six months after first announcing its intentions to do so due to security concerns related to the Israel-Hamas war. The decision, which requires recertification every 45 days, includes shutting down Al Jazeera broadcasts in Arabic and English; ...

May 2, 2024

The BI.ZONE Threat Intelligence team has uncovered a fresh campaign by the group targeting Russian and Belarusian organizations. The threat actors are distributing phishing emails under the guise of a federal agency. The emails have a legitimate document as an attachment. It aims to lull the recipient’s vigilance and prompt them to open the other file, ...

April 25, 2024

The use of spyware in Poland under the previous government resulted in accusations that the authorities were abusing power and eroding democratic guardrails. Poland’s prosecutor general said on Wednesday that Pegasus spyware was used against hundreds of people during the former Polish government. Adam Bodnar told lawmakers that he found the scale of the surveillance to ...

April 22, 2024

Kapersky researchers continue covering the activities of the APT group ToddyCat. In their previous article, they described tools for collecting and exfiltrating files (LoFiSe and PcExter). This time, the researchers have investigated how attackers obtain constant access to compromised infrastructure, what information on the hosts they are interested in, and what tools they use to extract ...

April 22, 2024

UK businesses are rapidly losing confidence in the government’s ability to protect them from cyberattacks. This is according to a new report from cybersecurity researchers Armis, which states that the lack of faith is higher than anywhere else in Europe. To draft the report, Armis surveyed more than 2,600 global security and IT decision-makers, and included ...

April 16, 2024

Proofpoint researchers track numerous state-sponsored and state-aligned threat actors. TA427 (also known as Emerald Sleet, APT43, THALLIUM or Kimsuky), a Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) aligned group working in support of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, is particularly prolific in email phishing campaigns targeting experts for insight into US and the Republic of ...

April 16, 2024

According to the organisation, the attack happened in January, leading to the exposure of the personal information of stakeholders. ITAC is an institution dedicated to promoting fair trade in South Africa in order to enhance economic growth and development. The site includes trade and tariff services as well as import and export control services. In a ...

April 10, 2024

Moscow has blacklisted 22 British government officials, members of the IT sector and legal service market as a measure of retaliation, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Those blacklisted particularly include employees of British companies, namely Micro Focus, providing Ukrainian forces with “software and cyber protection services necessary in the process of data collection ...

April 4, 2024

In the first quarter of 2024, researchers from Positive Technologies Expert Security Center (PT ESC) detected a series of attacks targeting government organizations in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Armenia. The research team could not find any links to known groups that used the same techniques. The main goal of the attack was stealing ...

April 4, 2024

Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, has held talks with parliamentary staff following suspected sexting honeytrap attacks targeting MPs, staffers and political journalists. At least 12 men working in and around Parliament, including a serving minister and other MPs, have been targeted on WhatsApp in a suspected spear phishing attack. Attackers contacted their victims under the ...

March 17, 2024

Speaking at a news conference in Moscow, Ella Pamfilova, head of Russia’s Central Election Commission, said that the overall turnout in the presidential election as of 3:45 p.m. Moscow time (1245GMT), taking into account remote electronic voting, is 70.81%. Pamfilova also said that about 280,000 DDoS cyberattacks against remote electronic voting had been foiled, including 215,000 ...

March 14, 2024

Two years ago, the Irish government fixed a vulnerability in its national COVID-19 vaccination portal that exposed the vaccination records of around a million residents. But details of the vulnerability weren’t revealed until this week after attempts to coordinate public disclosure with the government agency stalled and ended. Security researcher Aaron Costello said he discovered the ...

March 11, 2024

President Vladimir Putin’s foreign intelligence service on Monday accused the United States of trying to meddle in Russia’s presidential election and said that Washington even had plans to launch a cyber attack on the online voting system. Putin, who is almost certain to win the March 15-17 presidential election, has warned the West that any attempts ...

March 6, 2024

Capita has incurred £25.3m in costs tied to a cyber attack last March as the outsourcing giant swung to an annual loss and ramped up its cost-cutting programme. Shares fell 16 per cent on Wednesday morning. The group, which runs key local government, military and NHS services, posted a pretax loss of £106.6m for 2023, compared ...

March 5, 2024

The Ministry of Defence blamed an unnamed individual’s improper use of a “non-secure data line” for the recent leak of a German army conversation about the Taurus weapon system to Russia. The mistake was made by the participant who took part in the conversation from Singapore and had dialled in via a “non-secure data line” such ...

February 29, 2024

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) are releasing this joint CSA, to disseminate known TTPs and IOCs associated with the Phobos ransomware variants observed as recently as February 2024, according to open source reporting. Phobos is structured as a ransomware-as-a-service ...

February 29, 2024

The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has said that it is investigating a potential cybersecurity incident involving its systems. The DFA said that it was notified by Ireland’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) yesterday about the possible security breach and is working closely with the NCSC to establish whether this allegation is authentic. It follows reports ...

February 27, 2024

Zscaler’s ThreatLabz discovered a suspicious PDF file uploaded to VirusTotal from Latvia on January 30th, 2024. This PDF file is masqueraded as an invitation letter from the Ambassador of India, inviting diplomats to a wine-tasting event in February 2024. The PDF also included a link to a fake questionnaire that redirects users to a malicious ZIP ...

February 22, 2024

Malawi’s government has suspended the issuing of passports following a cyber-attack on the immigration service’s computer network. President Lazarus Chakwera told MPs that the targeting of the department amounted to a “serious national security breach”. He revealed that the hackers were asking for a ransom. But the president said the government would not give in to ...