- Ransomware attack halts Argentinian border crossing for four hours
September 6, 2020
Argentina’s official immigration agency, Dirección Nacional de Migraciones, suffered a Netwalker ransomware attack that temporarily halted border crossing into and out of the country. While ransomware attacks against cities and local agencies have become all too common, this may be a first known attack against a federal agency that has interrupted a country’s operations. According to a ...
- Transparent Tribe: Evolution analysis, part 1
August 20, 2020
Transparent Tribe, also known as PROJECTM and MYTHIC LEOPARD, is a highly prolific group whose activities can be traced as far back as 2013. Proofpoint published a very good article about them in 2016, and since that day, we have kept an eye on the group. We have periodically reported their activities through our APT ...
- New FritzFrog P2P botnet has breached at least 500 enterprise, government servers
August 19, 2020
A P2P botnet newly-discovered by researchers has struck at least 500 government and enterprise SSH servers over 2020. On Wednesday, cybersecurity firm Guardicore Labs published research into FritzFrog, a peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet that has been detected by the company’s sensors since January this year. According to researcher Ophir Harpaz, FritzFrog has attempted to brute-force SSH servers belonging ...
- Hacked government, college sites push malware via fake hacking tools
August 10, 2020
A large scale hacking campaign is targeting governments and university websites to host articles on hacking social network accounts that lead to malware and scams. BleepingComputer first learned about this campaign after security intelligence firm Cyble shared a screenshot of the UNESCO.org site compromised to host an article on how to hack Instagram accounts. Clicking on the ...
- UK: Russian hackers stole trade papers from Liam Fox email
August 3, 2020
Documents on UK-US trade talks, leaked ahead of the 2019 general election, were stolen from an email account belonging to Conservative MP Liam Fox, it has emerged. The papers were published online and used by Labour in the 2019 campaign to claim the NHS would be put at risk. The UK government has said Russians almost certainly ...
- FBI warns of Netwalker ransomware targeting US government and organisations
July 29, 2020
The FBI has issued a security alert about Netwalker ransomware operators targeting U.S. and foreign government organizations, advising their victims not to pay the ransom and reporting incidents to their local FBI field offices. FBI’s flash alert also provides indicators of compromise associated with the Netwalker ransomware (also known as Mailto) and includes a list of ...
- Huawei 5G ban: UK networks must strip out equipment by 2027
July 14, 2020
UK mobile networks have been told they cannot buy any more 5G equipment from Huawei after the end of this year, and that they must remove the Chinese networking company’s technology from their 5G networks by the end of 2027. Culture secretary Oliver Dowden said: “Following US sanctions against Huawei and updated technical advice from our ...
- Cyber experts urge Australia to develop local capability to defend against hackers
July 12, 2020
Cyber experts have urged the federal government to become less reliant on overseas businesses, technologies and expertise for its defences against hackers as it puts the finishing touches on the nation’s new cyber security strategy. Foreign providers are responsible for most of the cyber security products and services in Australia, with no local companies among the ...
- Brazilian federal police investigates presidential data leak
June 26, 2020
The Brazilian federal police reported advances around an investigation into a cybercrime organization supposedly responsible for exposing personal details of senior government officials including president Jair Bolsonaro. The investigation follows a leak earlier this month, claimed by hacker group Anonymous Brazil, involving personal information relating to Bolsonaro, his sons and supporters, as well as various ministers. Information ...
- Australian PM says nation under serious state-run ‘cyber attack’ – Microsoft, Citrix, Telerik UI bugs ‘exploited’
June 19, 2020
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called a snap press conference to reveal that the nation is under cyber-attack by a state-based actor, but the nation’s infosec advice agency says that while the attacker has gained access to some systems it has not conducted “any disruptive or destructive activities within victim environments.” Morrison said the attack ...
- Tropic Trooper’s Back: USBferry Attack Targets Air-gapped Environments
May 12, 2020
Tropic Trooper, a threat actor group that targets government, military, healthcare, transportation, and high-tech industries in Taiwan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, has been active since 2011. The group was reportedly using spear-phishing emails with weaponized attachments to exploit known vulnerabilities. Primarily motivated by information theft and espionage, the group has also been seen adopting different strategies such ...
- Updated BackConfig Malware Targeting Government and Military Organizations in South Asia
May 11, 2020
Unit 42 has observed activity over the last 4 months involving the BackConfig malware used by the Hangover threat group (aka Neon, Viceroy Tiger, MONSOON). Targets of the spear-phishing attacks, using local and topical lures, included government and military organizations in South Asia. The BackConfig custom trojan has a flexible plug-in architecture for components offering various features, including ...
- Israel government tells water treatment companies to change passwords
April 27, 2020
The Israeli government says that hackers have targeted its water supply and treatment facilities last week. In a security alert sent by the Israeli National Cyber-Directorate (INCD), the agency is urging personnel at companies active in the energy and water sectors to change passwords for all internet-connected systems. If passwords can’t be changed, the agency recommended taking ...
- State-backed phishing targets U.S. Government employees with fast food lures
April 22, 2020
More than a dozen state-backed hacking groups are actively targeting U.S. Government employees and healthcare organizations in phishing campaigns that use lures designed to take advantage of the fears surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. “TAG has specifically identified over a dozen government-backed attacker groups using COVID-19 themes as lure for phishing and malware attempts—trying to get their targets to ...
- German government might have lost tens of millions of euros in COVID-19 phishing attack
April 18, 2020
The government of North Rhine-Westphalia, a province in western Germany, is believed to have lost tens of millions of euros after it failed to build a secure website for distributing coronavirus emergency aid funding. The funds were lost following a classic phishing operation. Cybercriminals created copies of an official website that the NRW Ministry of Economic Affairs had set ...
- PoetRAT Trojan targets energy sector using coronavirus lures
April 17, 2020
Government and energy sectors are being targeted in a new campaign that weaponizes the coronavirus outbreak. On Thursday, Cisco Talos researchers Warren Mercer, Paul Rascagneres and Vitor Ventura published an analysis of a new campaign that deploys PoetRAT, a previously-undiscovered Remote Access Trojan (RAT) striking both the Azerbaijan government and utility companies. According to the team, the malware attacks supervisory control ...
- DarkHotel hackers use VPN zero-day to breach Chinese government agencies
April 6, 2020
Foreign state-sponsored hackers have launched a massive hacking operation aimed at Chinese government agencies and their employees. Attacks began last month, in March, and are believed to be related to the current coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. Chinese security-firm Qihoo 360, which detected the intrusions, said the hackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Sangfor SSL VPN servers, used to provide ...
- UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is looking for organisations who can support in the supply of ventilators and ventilator components
March 20, 2020
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) is looking for organisations who can support in the supply of ventilators and ventilator components across the United Kingdom as part of the Government’s response to COVID-19. These questions aim to identify the suitability and readiness of organisations to be involved in the initiative. There are three ...
- US government agencies have shadow IT infrastructure problem, cybersecurity risks, says GAO
March 5, 2020
Federal agencies are facing increasing cybersecurity risks due to a bevy of IT facilities aren’t being tracked as full-fledged data centers, according to a General Accountability Office report. As noted previously, federal agencies have been consolidating and closing data centers over the years, but a narrower definition of what facilities should fall under an optimization program means that ...
- Molerats Delivers Spark Backdoor to Government and Telecommunications Organizations
March 3, 2020
Between October 2019 through the beginning of December 2019, Unit 42 observed multiple instances of phishing attacks likely related to a threat group known as Molerats (AKA Gaza Hackers Team and Gaza Cybergang) targeting eight organizations in six different countries in the government, telecommunications, insurance and retail industries, of which the latter two were quite ...