Government

February 2, 2025

The U.S. Agency for International Development’s director of security and his deputy were placed on administrative leave Saturday after they tried to prevent employees from the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing secure USAID systems, five sources familiar with the events told NBC News. The USAID systems the DOGE team tried to access included personnel files ...

January 29, 2025

We identified a cluster of activity that we track as CL-STA-0048. This cluster targeted high-value targets in South Asia, including a telecommunications organization. This activity cluster used rare tools and techniques including the technique we call Hex Staging, in which the attackers deliver payloads in chunks. Their activity also includes exfiltration over DNS using ping, and ...

January 29, 2025

Whitehall departments are at growing risk of being hacked because anti-cyber attack defences are ‘lower’ than thought, an alarming report has found. The inquiry by the National Audit Office (NAO) was branded a ‘wake-up call’ for officials to step-up defences against hostile actors.It identified a shortage of cyber skills within departments and risks posed by outdated ...

January 22, 2025

On Tuesday, a day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as the new U.S. president, the Department of Homeland Security told members of several advisory committees that they were effectively fired. Among the committees impacted is the Cyber Safety Review Board, or CSRB, according to sources familiar with the board who spoke to TechCrunch, as well as reporting ...

January 22, 2025

U.S. government contractor Conduent, which provides technology to support services such as child support and food assistance, has confirmed that a recent outage was caused by a cybersecurity incident. Conduent confirmed the disruption, which left some U.S. residents without access to support payments, to TechCrunch on Tuesday but declined to say whether the outage was related ...

January 16, 2025

Star Blizzard’s new spear-phishing campaign, while novel in that it uses and targets WhatsApp for the first time, exhibits familiar spear-phishing TTPs for Star Blizzard, with the threat actor initiating email contact with their targets, to engage them, before sending them a second message containing a malicious link. The sender address used by the threat actor ...

January 8, 2025

Japan on Wednesday linked more than 200 cyberattacks over the past five years targeting the country’s national security and high technology data to a Chinese hacking group, MirrorFace, detailing their tactics and calling on government agencies and businesses to reinforce preventive measures. MirrorFace sent emails with attachments containing malware to targeted organizations and individuals to view ...

January 7, 2025

As part of Washington’s lawsuit, the state claims T-Mobile failed to ‘adequately secure sensitive personal information of more than 2 million Washingtonians’. This failure, the state claims, left those consumers vulnerable to fraud and identity theft. The suit claims that the breach was ‘entirely avoidable’ and explains T-Mobile had years to fix key vulnerabilities in its ...

December 30, 2024

The Treasury Department told lawmakers Monday that a state-sponsored actor in China hacked its systems, accessing several user workstations and certain unclassified documents. The treasury was informed on Dec. 8 by a third-party software service provider, BeyondTrust, that a threat actor used a stolen key to remotely access certain workstations and unclassified documents, according to a ...

December 30, 2024

Federal authorities have arrested and indicted a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m, a cybercriminal who has been selling and leaking sensitive customer call records stolen earlier this year from AT&T and Verizon. As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity last month, the accused is a communications specialist who was recently stationed in South Korea. ...

December 28, 2024

Hackers targeted around ten official websites in Italy on Saturday, including the websites of the Foreign Ministry and Milan’s two airports, putting them out of action temporarily, the country’s cyber security agency said. The pro-Russian hacker group Noname057(16) claimed the cyber attack on Telegram, saying Italy’s “Russophobes get a well deserved cyber response”. Read more… Source: MSN News Sign ...

December 26, 2024

On April 25, the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) experienced a privacy breach. An outside entity, through a phishing campaign, gained access to multiple employee accounts, and files associated with the accounts. The files included the Social Security numbers (SSNs) of 4,701 customers and three employees. Separately, public assistance account information (name, public assistance account ...

December 20, 2024

Ukraine government databases, described as critically important infrastructure, have been hit by a cyber attack that’s being blamed on Russia. Deputy prime minister Olha Stefanishyna said it was the largest external cyber attack on the state registers of Ukraine in recent times. “As a result of a targeted attack, the work of the Unified and State Registers, ...

December 15, 2024

The Department of Justice has recorded more than 480 data breaches over the past three years, including the loss of sensitive papers, encrypted devices, and unauthorised access to social media. The breaches occurred across the department including key areas such as international protection, the response to the Ukraine refugee crisis, and in citizenship applications. A log ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...