The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), U.S. Department of Treasury, and Israel National Cyber Directorate are releasing this Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to warn network defenders of new cyber tradecraft of the Iranian cyber group Emennet Pasargad, which has been operating under the company name Aria Sepehr Ayandehsazan (ASA) and is known by the private sector terms Cotton Sandstorm, Marnanbridge, and Haywire Kitten.
The group exhibited new tradecraft in its efforts to conduct cyberenabled information operations into mid-2024 using a myriad of cover personas, including multiple cyber operations that occurred during and targeting the 2024 Summer Olympics – including the compromise of a French commercial dynamic display provider. ASA has also undertaken a project to harvest content from IP cameras and used online resources related to Artificial Intelligence.
Read more…
Source: U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation Cyber Division
Related:
- Russian State-Sponsored Cyber Actors Target Cleared Defense Contractor Networks to Obtain Sensitive U.S. Defense Information and Technology
February 16, 2022
From at least January 2020, through February 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA), and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have observed regular targeting of U.S. cleared defense contractors (CDCs) by Russian state-sponsored cyber actors. The actors have targeted both large and small CDCs and subcontractors with varying levels of ...
- Maryland Air National Guard conduct first-ever defensive cyber training on base network
February 16, 2022
MIDDLE RIVER, MD — Members of the 275th Cyberspace Operations Squadron, Maryland Air National Guard, conducted one of the first-ever enduring defensive cyber training missions in a Title 32 mobilization status on an installation’s network, at Warfield Air National Guard Base, Maryland, Nov. 16-19, 2021. “This training is a very unique opportunity and it is the ...
- Tripwire for real war? Cyber’s fuzzy rules of engagement
February 14, 2022
President Joe Biden couldn’t have been more blunt about the risks of cyberattacks spinning out of control. “If we end up in a war, a real shooting war with a major power, it’s going to be as a consequence of a cyber breach of great consequence,” he told his intelligence brain trust in July. Now tensions ...
- CIA illegally harvested US citizens’ data, senators assert
February 11, 2022
Two US senators have gone public with evidence of what they assert is a previously secret bulk data collection effort by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), conducted outside the law and without oversight. Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, of Oregon and New Mexico respectively, on Thursday announced that in April 2021 they sent a ...
- A sign of ransomware growth: Gangs now arbitrate disputes
February 9, 2022
Cyber criminal gangs are getting increasingly adept at hacking and becoming more professional, even setting up an arbitration system to resolve payment disputes among themselves, according to a new report by the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom that paints a bleak picture of ransomware trends. Ransomware gangs, which hack targets and hold their data ...
- North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet
February 2, 2022
For the past two weeks, observers of North Korea’s strange and tightly restricted corner of the internet began to notice that the country seemed to be dealing with some serious connectivity problems. On several different days, practically all of its websites—the notoriously isolated nation only has a few dozen—intermittently dropped offline en masse, from the ...
