- Cybersecurity laws to be updated to boost UK protection from cyber attacks
November 30, 2022
The UK’s cybersecurity laws will be updated to require outsourced IT providers to meet security standards as part of efforts to better protect supply chains, the Government has announced. The Network and Information Systems (NIS) Regulations will be updated so third-party firms providing IT services to businesses will be compelled to have effective cybersecurity measures in ...
- US bans Huawei, ZTE equipment sales amid Chinese spying fears
November 27, 2022
The Biden administration has banned approvals of new telecommunications equipment from China’s Huawei Technologies and ZTE because they pose “an unacceptable risk” to US national security. The US Federal Communications Commission said on Friday it had adopted the final rules, which also bar the sale or import of equipment made by China’s surveillance equipment maker Dahua ...
- OPERA1ER APT in Africa
November 3, 2022
In 2019, Group-IB Threat Intelligence team detected a series of targeted attacks on financial organizations in Africa. Later in 2020, our professionals in collaboration with Orange, managed to piece together the seemingly disparate attacks into a single timeline and successfully attribute them to the threat actor codenamed OPERA1ER (also known as DESKTOP-GROUP, Common Raven, NXSMS). In ...
- Vodafone Italy discloses data breach after reseller hacked
November 2, 2022
Vodafone Italia is sending customers notices of a data breach, informing that one of its commercial partners, FourB S.p.A., who operates as a reseller of the telecommunications services in the country, has suffered a cyberattack. According to the notice, the cyberattack took place in the first week of September and resulted in the compromise of sensitive ...
- Russian spies ‘hacked Liz Truss’s phone and stole sensitive messages’
October 29, 2022
Liz Truss had her phone hacked by Kremlin spies while she was working as foreign secretary, according to a report. The former prime minister’s personal messages with former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng were raided, as well as sensitive details of international negotiations, it is claimed. Security services discovered the major security breach during the summer Tory leadership election, ...
- Verizon notifies prepaid customers their accounts were breached
October 18, 2022
Verizon warned an undisclosed number of prepaid customers that attackers gained access to Verizon accounts and used exposed credit card info in SIM swapping attacks. “We determined that between October 6 and October 10, 2022, a third party actor accessed the last four digits of the credit card used to make automatic payments on your account,” ...
- Cyber attack on Bulgarian government websites traced to Russia
October 16, 2022
The head of Bulgaria’s National Investigation Service, Borislav Sarafov, said on October 16 that the perpetrator of a cyber attack the previous day on several Bulgarian state, government and private websites had been identified, and the attack had come from a city in Russia. Sarafov told Bulgarian media that the name and address of the perpetrator ...
- Australia asks FBI to help find attacker who stole data from millions of users
September 28, 2022
Australian authorities have asked the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to assist with investigations into the data breach at local telco Optus. Attorney general Mark Dreyfus yesterday revealed the FBI was asked to help identify the entities involved in the attack, which saw Optus leak data describing over ten million account holders. Data suspected ...
- New hacking group ‘Metador’ lurking in ISP networks for months
September 25, 2022
A previously unknown threat actor that researchers have named ‘Metador’ has been breaching telecommunications, internet services providers (ISPs), and universities for about two years. Metador targets organizations in the Middle East and Africa and their purpose appears to be long-term persistence for espionage. The group uses two Windows-based malware that have been described as “extremely complex” ...
- Russian Sandworm hackers pose as Ukrainian telcos to drop malware
September 19, 2022
The Russian state-sponsored hacking group known as Sandworm has been observed masquerading as telecommunication providers to target Ukrainian entities with malware. Sandworm is a state-backed threat actor attributed by the US government as part of the Russian GRU foreign military intelligence service. The APT hacking group is believed to have been behind numerous attacks this year, including ...
- Hive ransomware claims cyberattack on Bell Canada subsidiary
September 15, 2022
The Hive ransomware gang claimed responsibility for an attack that hit the systems of Bell Canada subsidiary Bell Technical Solutions (BTS). BTS is an independent subsidiary with more than 4,500 employees, specializing in installing Bell services for residential and small business customers across the Ontario and Québec provinces. While the Canadian telecommunications company didn’t reveal when its ...
- New Wave of Espionage Activity Targets Asian Governments
September 13, 2022
A distinct group of espionage attackers who were formerly associated with the ShadowPad remote access Trojan (RAT) has adopted a new, diverse toolset to mount an ongoing campaign against a range of government and state-owned organizations in a number of Asian countries. The attacks, which have been underway since at least early 2021, appear to ...
- US telcos admit to storing, handing over location data
September 2, 2022
US mobile carriers know a lot about where their customers every move, and according to letters sent to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), they routinely store such location data for years, willingly hand it over to law enforcement if served a proper subpoena, and say users can’t opt out. FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a ...
- Indian military ready to put long-range quantum key distribution on the line
August 15, 2022
India’s military has celebrated the nation’s Independence Day by announcing it will adopt locally developed quantum key distribution (QKD) technology that can operate across distances of 150km. QKD is a technology to securely distribute encryption keys – items that could make communications an open book to an adversary. QKD makes interception of encryption keys vastly difficult ...
- Private 5G Network Security Expectations Part 3
July 11, 2022
Trend Micro conducted a survey on private wireless network security in collaboration with 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, in four countries (Germany, the U.K, Spain, and the U.S.) across the manufacturing, electricity, oil and gas, and healthcare industries. Trend Micro have introduced this survey’s findings on the expectations for private 5G security ...
- Canada’s internet outage caused by ‘maintenance’
July 10, 2022
One of Canada’s largest mobile and internet providers, Rogers, has apologised for the country-wide outage of its services which began on Friday. The company’s CEO Tony Staffieri said the failure followed “a maintenance update in our core network”. Transport, banking and emergency services were all hit by Friday’s blackout, with 911 hotlines and bank ATMs left unavailable. Read ...
- Germany unveils plan to tackle cyberattacks on satellites
July 5, 2022
The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has put out an IT baseline protection profile for space infrastructure amid concerns that attackers could turn their gaze skywards. The document, published last week, is the result of a year of work by Airbus Defence and Space, the German Space Agency at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), ...
- GALLIUM Expands Targeting Across Telecommunications, Government and Finance Sectors With New PingPull Tool
June 13, 2022
Over the past year, this group has extended its targeting beyond telecommunication companies to also include financial institutions and government entities. During this period, we have identified several connections between GALLIUM infrastructure and targeted entities across Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Cambodia, Malaysia, Mozambique, the Philippines, Russia and Vietnam. Most importantly, we have also identified the group’s ...
- People’s Republic of China State-Sponsored Cyber Actors Exploit Network Providers and Devices
June 8, 2022
This joint Cybersecurity Advisory describes the ways in which People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored cyber actors continue to exploit publicly known vulnerabilities in order to establish a broad network of compromised infrastructure. These actors use the network to exploit a wide variety of targets worldwide, including public and private sector organizations. The advisory details the ...
- Ukraine’s secret cyber-defense that blunts Russian attacks: excellent backups
June 8, 2022
The Kremlin-backed cyberattack against satellite communications provider Viasat, which happened an hour before Russia invaded Ukraine, was “one of the biggest cyber events that we have seen, perhaps ever, and certainly in warfare,” according to Dmitri Alperovitch, a co-founder of CrowdStrike and chair of security-centric think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator. Alperovitch shared that opinion during a ...