- Significant hack potentially exposes US lawmakers’ personal data
March 9, 2023
A serious breach at a healthcare administrator serving the U.S. House of Representatives has potentially exposed the personal data of hundreds of lawmakers and their staff, top representatives and a senior Congressional official said in letters circulated on Wednesday. One of the letters, which the House’s Chief Administrative Officer Catherine Szpindor (CAO) sent to members of ...
- Top cyber official steps down as Biden admin charts new strategy
February 17, 2023
John C. Inglis left his post as the first national cyber director this week while the Biden administration plans a new cyber strategy. Mr. Inglis formally exited before the administration details its long-anticipated national cybersecurity strategy that his team has played a lead role in developing. Read more… Source: The Washington Times
- UK government “left council to deal with ransomware attack” that cost £11m
February 9, 2023
The government left Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council to fight a massive ransomware attack alone for a week, with minimal support or correspondence, the council’s leader has said. Mary Lanigan told MPs yesterday that while police and cybercrime officers were on site within two days, help from Westminster was lacking. Recovering from the incident cost ...
- SNP MP Stewart McDonald’s emails hacked by Russian group
February 8, 2023
An MP has told the BBC his emails have been stolen and he fears they will be made public. The SNP’s Stewart McDonald said the hack took place in January and he wanted to pre-empt any publication sharing them. Read more… Source: BBC News
- Italy warns hackers targeting known server vulnerability
February 6, 2023
Thousands of computer servers have been targeted by a global ransomware hacking attack targeting VMware ESXi servers, Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN) said on Sunday, warning organisations to take action to protect their systems. The hacking attack sought to exploit a software vulnerability, ACN director general Roberto Baldoni told Reuters, adding it was on a massive ...
- UK: Army spied on lockdown critics
January 29, 2023
A shadowy Army unit secretly spied on British citizens who criticised the Government’s Covid lockdown policies, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. Military operatives in the UK’s ‘information warfare’ brigade were part of a sinister operation that targeted politicians and high-profile journalists who raised doubts about the official pandemic response. Read more… Source: Daily Mail
- Iranian and Russian hackers targeting politicians and journalists, warn UK officials
January 26, 2023
Iranian and Russian hackers are targeting British politicians and journalists with espionage attacks, officials have warned. The National Cyber Security Centre has issued a fresh alert about increasing attempts to steal information from specific groups and individuals. Read more… Source: BBC News
- US authorities release asylum seekers after leaking their data online
January 23, 2023
Nearly 3,000 immigrants seeking asylum in the United States have been released from custody after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials inadvertently published their personal information online. Records including names, birth dates, nationalities and detention locations of 6,252 immigrants were posted to an area of ICE’s website normally used to report detention statistics last November. Further ...
- Hacker finds copy of TSA no-fly list on exposed cloud storage
January 22, 2023
A copy of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s “no-fly list” has been found by a Swiss hacker exposed on the open internet in yet another case of misconfigured cloud storage. First reported by The Daily Dot, the exposure of the database was found by a Swiss hacker known as “maia arson crimew” on a server run ...
- Fortinet: Government networks targeted with now-patched SSL-VPN zero-day
January 12, 2023
Fortinet says unknown attackers exploited a FortiOS SSL-VPN zero-day vulnerability patched last month in attacks against government organizations and government-related targets. The security flaw (CVE-2022-42475) abused in these incidents is a heap-based buffer overflow weakness found in the FortiOS SSLVPNd that allowed unauthenticated attackers to crash targeted devices remotely or gain remote code execution. The network security ...
- Pakistan’s government to agencies: Dark web is dangerous, please don’t go there
January 10, 2023
Pakistan’s government has warned its agencies that the dark web exists, is home to all sorts of unpleasant people, and should be avoided. That revelatory information was delivered last week in a cabinet advisory titled “Leakaqe of Sensitive Data on Dark Web (AdvisorvNo.53)” that was issued without fanfare. Much of the document is anodyne, pointing out ...
- Ransomware and wiper signed with stolen certificates
December 22, 2022
On July 17, 2022, Albanian news outlets reported a massive cyberattack that affected Albanian government e-services. A few weeks later, it was revealed that the cyberattacks were part of a coordinated effort likely intended to cripple the country’s computer systems. On September 10, 2022, Albanian local news reported a second wave of cyberattacks targeting Albania’s ...
- Raspberry Robin Malware Targets Telecom, Governments
December 20, 2022
Trend Micro researchers found a malware sample allegedly capable of connecting to the Tor network to deliver its payloads. Their initial analysis of the malware, which compromised a number of organizations toward the end of September, showed that while the main malware routine contains both the real and fake payloads, it loads the fake payload ...
- Iran-linked Charming Kitten espionage gang bares claws to pollies, power orgs
December 15, 2022
An Iranian cyber espionage gang with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has learned new methods and phishing techniques, and aimed them at a wider set of targets – including politicians, government officials, critical infrastructure and medical researchers – according to email security vendor Proofpoint. Over the past two years, the threat actor group that ...
- Ukrainian government networks breached via trojanized Windows 10 installers
December 15, 2022
Ukrainian government entities were hacked in targeted attacks after their networks were first compromised via trojanized ISO files posing as legitimate Windows 10 installers. These malicious installers delivered malware capable of collecting data from compromised computers, deploying additional malicious tools, and exfiltrating stolen data to attacker-controlled servers. One of the ISOs pushed in this campaign was hosted ...
- Hackers target Japanese politicians with new MirrorStealer malware
December 15, 2022
A hacking group tracked as MirrorFace has been targeting Japanese politicians for weeks before the House of Councilors election in July 2022, using a previously undocumented credentials stealer named ‘MirrorStealer.’ The campaign was discovered by ESET, whose analysts report they could piece together evidence thanks to operational mistakes made by the hackers that left traces behind. The ...
- Ransomware gang targets Belgian municipality, hits police instead
November 26, 2022
The Ragnar Locker ransomware gang has published stolen data from what they thought was the municipality of Zwijndrecht, but turned out to be stolen from Zwijndrecht police, a local police unit in Antwerp, Belgium. The leaked data reportedly exposed thousands of car number plates, fines, crime report files, personnel details, investigation reports, and more. This type of ...
- Iranian Hackers Installed Crypto Miner in Federal Agency After Exploiting Unpatched Log4Shell Vulnerability
November 25, 2022
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said Iranian hackers breached a federal agency that failed to patch the Log4Shell vulnerability and deployed a crypto miner. The Log4Shell vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) is a critical remote code execution flaw on Apache’s Log4j logging library popular with Java developers. The breach that occurred as early as February 2022 impacted ...
- Vanuatu: Hackers strand Pacific island government for over a week
November 18, 2022
Vanuatu’s government has been knocked offline for more than 11 days after a suspected cyber-attack on servers in the country. The hack has disabled the websites of the Pacific island’s parliament, police and prime minister’s office. It has also taken down the email system, intranet and online databases of schools, hospitals and other emergency services as well ...
- Earth Preta Spear-Phishing Governments Worldwide
November 17, 2022
Trend Micro researchers have been monitoring a wave of spear-phishing attacks targeting the government, academic, foundations, and research sectors around the world. Based on the lure documents researchers observed in the wild, this is a large-scale cyberespionage campaign that began around March. After months of tracking, the seemingly wide outbreak of targeted attacks includes but ...