News – October 2023


  • Europol: Ragnar Locker ransomware gang taken down by international police swoop

    October 20, 2023

    This week, law enforcement and judicial authorities from eleven countries delivered a major blow to one of the most dangerous ransomware operations of recent years. This action, coordinated at international level by Europol and Eurojust, targeted the Ragnar Locker ransomware group. The group were responsible for numerous high-profile attacks against critical infrastructure across the world. In ...

  • Money-making scripts attack organizations

    October 19, 2023

    In April of this year, the FBI published an advisory on attacks targeting government, law enforcement, and non-profit organizations. Attackers download scripts onto victims’ devices, delivering several types of malware all at once. The main aim is to utilize company resources for mining, steal data using keyloggers, and gain backdoor access to systems. According to Kaspersky ...

  • Crambus: New Campaign Targets Middle Eastern Government

    October 19, 2023

    The Iranian Crambus espionage group (aka OilRig, APT34) staged an eight-month-long intrusion against a government in the Middle East between February and September 2023. During the compromise, the attackers stole files and passwords and, in one case, installed a PowerShell backdoor (dubbed PowerExchange) that was used to monitor incoming mails sent from an Exchange Server ...

  • How BPF-Enabled Malware Works

    October 19, 2023

    Berkeley Packet Filtering (BPF) is a kind of technology that allows programs to effectively execute code in the kernels of modern operating systems, such as Linux and Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) variants. Soon, Windows will also add support for BPF. While many defenders might be unaware of its existence, cybercriminals have already started using BPF ...

  • Ransomware actor exploits unsupported ColdFusion servers – but comes away empty-handed

    October 19, 2023

    Servers are always a point of interest for threat actors as they are one of the most efficient attack vectors to penetrate an organization. Server-related accounts often have the highest privilege levels, making lateral movement to other machines in the network easily achievable. Sophos X-Ops has observed a wide variety of threats being delivered to ...

  • Another InfoStealer Enters the Field, ExelaStealer

    October 19, 2023

    In 2023, the InfoStealer market is a reasonably crowded affair. The likes of RedLine, Raccoon, and Vidar own a significant market share, with new entrants such as SaphireStealer appearing frequently. The latest entry, ExelaStealer has now taken the field. Very little backstory is available on ExelaStealer, with the earliest public mentions FortiGuard Labs could locate ...

  • Philippines to recruit ‘cyber warriors’ for online defence

    October 19, 2023

    The Philippine military is creating a cyber command to improve defences against almost daily cyber attacks and will relax recruitment rules to ensure it can attract online experts, the chief of the armed forces said on Thursday. Several government agencies, including the lower house of Congress, have recently reported cyber attacks and the chief of the ...

  • Top crypto firms named in $1bn fraud lawsuit

    October 19, 2023

    US prosecutors have accused three high-profile cryptocurrency firms of defrauding investors of more than $1bn. New York Attorney General Letitia James said Gemini, a crypto exchange, had lied to customers about the risks of an investment account it offered, which paid high interest rates on crypto. Genesis, a crypto lender, and its parent company Digital Currency ...

  • Hacker leaks millions more 23andMe user records on cybercrime forum

    October 18, 2023

    The same hacker who leaked a trove of user data stolen from the genetic testing company 23andMe two weeks ago has now leaked millions of new user records. On Tuesday, a hacker who goes by Golem published a new dataset of 23andMe user information containing records of four million users on the known cybercrime forum ...

  • Multiple North Korean threat actors exploiting the TeamCity CVE-2023-42793 vulnerability

    October 18, 2023

    Since early October 2023, Microsoft has observed two North Korean nation-state threat actors – Diamond Sleet and Onyx Sleet – exploiting CVE-2023-42793, a remote-code execution vulnerability affecting multiple versions of JetBrains TeamCity server. TeamCity is a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) application used by organizations for DevOps and other software development activities. In past operations, Diamond ...