Spain fires intelligence chief amid phone hacking scandals

Spain’s government fired the director of the country’s top intelligence agency Tuesday following the hacking of politicians’ cellphones, including the devices of the prime minister and several supporters of the Catalonia region’s secession. The National Intelligence Center, or CNI, has Read More …

Operation CuckooBees: Deep-Dive into Stealthy Winnti Techniques

In 2021, the Cybereason Nocturnus Incident Response Team investigated multiple intrusions targeting technology and manufacturing companies located in Asia, Europe and North America. Based on the findings of our investigation, it appears that the goal behind these intrusions was to Read More …

Chinese cyber-espionage group Moshen Dragon targets Asian telcos

Researchers have identified a new cluster of malicious cyber activity tracked as Moshen Dragon, targeting telecommunication service providers in Central Asia. While this new threat group has some overlaps with “RedFoxtrot” and “Nomad Panda,” including the use of ShadowPad and Read More …

Spanish PM, defense minister latest Pegasus spyware victims

Spain’s prime minister and defense minister are the latest elected officials to detect Pegasus spyware on their mobile phones, according to multiple media reports quoting Spanish authorities. During a press conference on Monday, Félix Bolaños, the minister for the presidency, Read More …

UNC3524: Eye Spy on Your Email

Since December 2019, Mandiant has observed advanced threat actors increase their investment in tools to facilitate bulk email collection from victim environments, especially as it relates to their support of suspected espionage objectives. Email messages and their attachments offer a Read More …

Hacking Russia was off-limits. The Ukraine war made it a free-for-all.

For more than a decade, U.S. cybersecurity experts have warned about Russian hacking that increasingly uses the labor power of financially motivated criminal gangs to achieve political goals, such as strategically leaking campaign emails. Prolific ransomware groups in the last Read More …

Trello From the Other Side: Tracking APT29 Phishing Campaigns

Since early 2021, Mandiant has been tracking extensive APT29 phishing campaigns targeting diplomatic organizations in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. This blog post discusses our recent observations related to the identification of two new malware families in 2022, BEATDROP and Read More …

Assembling the Russian Nesting Doll: UNC2452 Merged into APT29

Mandiant has gathered sufficient evidence to assess that the activity tracked as UNC2452, the group name used to track the SolarWinds compromise in December 2020, is attributable to APT29. This conclusion matches attribution statements previously made by the U.S. Government Read More …

UK Prime Minister, Catalan groups ‘targeted by NSO Pegasus spyware’

Citizen Lab has reported finding suspected surveillance software on devices associated with both the UK Prime Minister’s Office and what was formerly called the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The Canadian research outfit also said it had identified at least Read More …