- Careto is back: what’s new after 10 years of silence?
December 12, 2024
During the first week of October, Kaspersky took part in the 34th Virus Bulletin International Conference, one of the longest-running cybersecurity events. There, Kaspersky researchers delivered multiple presentations, and one of our talks focused on newly observed activities by the Careto threat actor, which is also known as “The Mask”. The Mask APT is a legendary ...
- US sanctions Chinese cybersecurity firm for firewall hacks targeting critical infrastructure
December 10, 2024
The U.S. sanctioned a Chinese cybersecurity company and one of its employees for exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Sophos firewalls to target U.S. organizations. On Tuesday, the U.S. Treasury Department said Guan Tianfeng, an employee of Sichuan Silence, used the vulnerability to compromise approximately 81,000 firewalls in April 2020. The hacking campaign, detailed by Sophos in ...
- TaxOff: um, you’ve got a backdoor…
November 27, 2024
In Q3 2024, the Positive Technologies Expert Security Center (PT ESC) TI Department discovered a series of attacks on Russian government agencies. PT ESC researchers were unable to establish any connection with known groups using the same techniques. The main goal was espionage and gaining a foothold to follow through on further attacks. They dubbed the group ...
- Pakistan tests secret China-like ‘firewall’ to tighten online surveillance
November 26, 2024
Pakistan’s government has deployed Chinese technology to build what some senior officials familiar with the project are calling a new, national internet “firewall” that will allow authorities to monitor online traffic and regulate the use of popular apps with greater control than before. The project aims to upgrade the government’s web monitoring capabilities at the country’s ...
- Hackers who inflitrated South African financial system reveal data for a large number people
November 24, 2024
A hacking group that claims it fraudulently collected Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grants and infiltrated South Africa’s financial system through credit bureaus has released data appearing to belong to Absa and Standard Bank customers. N4aughtySecGroup contacted the media earlier this month with a warning that it had breached several credit bureaus and used its access ...
- UK: Prison layouts reportedly leaked on dark web
November 23, 2024
The Ministry of Justice has said it is aware of a data breach affecting prisons in England and Wales. Confidential prison layouts had been leaked onto the dark web in the past two weeks, according to The Times. A former prison governor told the paper organised crime groups could potentially use the information to smuggle drugs ...
- Elon Musk to British MPs: I’ll summon you, actually
November 21, 2024
Elon Musk is beefing with British politicians again — and they’re not impressed. The X owner and Donald Trump ally brushed off a call from the House of Commons’ science and technology committee to answer questions on his role in riots that swept the U.K. this summer. Committee chair Chi Onwurah told POLITICO this week that ...
- Greece: Technical issue, not cyber attack, behind Hellenic Revenue Service, National Security Service, and National Police websites downtime
November 15, 2024
A technical network problem rather than a cyberattack was ultimately responsible for the simultaneous loss of access observed on the afternoon of Thursday, November 14, to websites of ADC and other government agencies. As competent sources told prototheme.gr, after an investigation, it was found that the temporary interruption of access to websites of the State, such ...
- FBI: Easy Access to Information for Conducting Fraudulent Emergency Data Requests Impacts US-Based Companies and Law Enforcement Agencies
November 4, 2024
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is releasing this Private Industry Notification to highlight a trend of compromised US and foreign government email addresses used to conduct fraudulent emergency data requests to US-based companies, exposing personally identifying information (PII). While the concept of fraudulent emergency data requests was previously used by other threat actors, such as ...
- Canada labels India a ‘cyber adversary’ in new security report
November 1, 2024
India has been described as an adversary for the first time in an official Canadian government document. That description came in the National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025-2026 released by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, on Tuesday. In its section on cyber threat from “state adversaries”, it includes China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and India. In ...
- Chinese threat actor Storm-0940 uses credentials from password spray attacks from a covert network
October 31, 2024
Since August 2023, Microsoft has observed intrusion activity targeting and successfully stealing credentials from multiple Microsoft customers that is enabled by highly evasive password spray attacks. Microsoft has linked the source of these password spray attacks to a network of compromised devices we track as CovertNetwork-1658, also known as xlogin and Quad7 (7777). Microsoft is publishing ...
- Ireland: Almost 7,000 Government data breaches over last ten years
October 30, 2024
There have been 6,885 data breaches across Government departments over the last ten years. More than half of the breaches, 3,637 of them, occurred at the Department of Social Protection. The Department of Justice accounted for 862 of the breaches, with 757 breaches reported at the Department of Foreign Affairs. The majority of the data breaches ...
- Midnight Blizzard conducts large-scale spear-phishing campaign using RDP files
October 29, 2024
Since October 22, 2024, Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed Russian threat actor Midnight Blizzard sending a series of highly targeted spear-phishing emails to individuals in government, academia, defense, non-governmental organizations, and other sectors. This activity is ongoing, and Microsoft will continue to investigate and provide updates as available. Based on our investigation of previous Midnight Blizzard ...
- Hackers breach sensitive government and police data in Italy
October 28, 2024
Prosecutors in Milan have uncovered a network of hackers and former law enforcement officials accused of using malware and insider contacts to break into several government databases, including the Interior Ministry. The group allegedly accessed over 800,000 confidential records, even targeting accounts linked to the president’s office. Prosecutors said on Saturday that the operation was allegedly ...
- The Crypto Game of Lazarus APT: Investors vs. Zero-days
October 23, 2024
On May 13, 2024, Kaspersky consumer-grade product Kaspersky Total Security detected a new Manuscrypt infection on the personal computer of a person living in Russia. Since Lazarus rarely attacks individuals, this piqued Kaspersky researchers interest and they decided to take a closer look. The researchers discovered that prior to the detection of Manuscrypt, Kaspersky technologies also ...
- Russia says ‘unprecedented’ cyber attack hits foreign ministry amid BRICS summit
October 23, 2024
The Russian Foreign Ministry was targeted by a severe cyber attack on Wednesday, coinciding with the major BRICS summit taking place in the country, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. Earlier Zakharova said that the ministry had been targeted by a large-scale distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). “A massive cyberattack from abroad began this morning on the infrastructure of ...
- Data storage in spotlight of Italian security committee after Intesa breach
October 22, 2024
Italy’s influential parliamentary committee on security will hold a round of hearings on data storage following a major breach at the country’s biggest bank Intesa Sanpaolo, people familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday. Intesa Sanpaolo is under investigation by prosecutors in the southern Italian city of Bari after it emerged that the accounts of ...
- Analysis of the Crypt Ghouls group: continuing the investigation into a series of attacks on Russia
October 18, 2024
Last December, Kaspersky researchers discovered a new group targeting Russian businesses and government agencies with ransomware. Further investigation into this group’s activity suggests a connection to other groups currently targeting Russia. Kaspersky researchers have seen overlaps not only in indicators of compromise and tools, but also tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Moreover, the infrastructure partially overlaps ...
- Europol: Charges unveiled in ongoing effort to de-anonymise DDoS group Anonymous Sudan
October 17, 2024
US authorities have unveiled this week charges against two Sudanese nationals involved in a significant Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) cybercrime network, following an international investigation that spanned multiple countries. The investigation exposed the activities of Anonymous Sudan, a prolific cybercrime group conducting destructive DDoS attacks to support their ideologically-motivated agenda. Europol coordinated the European dimension of the investigation, ...
- Beyond the Surface: the evolution and expansion of the SideWinder APT group
October 15, 2024
SideWinder, aka T-APT-04 or RattleSnake, is one of the most prolific APT groups that began its activities in 2012 and was first publicly mentioned by us in 2018. Over the years, the group has launched attacks against high-profile entities in South and Southeast Asia. Its primary targets have been military and government entities in Pakistan, ...