A U.S. government website designed to inform the public about vaccines has been defaced and now hosts apparently AI-generated spam.
The domain, which belongs to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), appears to have been hosting the same kind of content — mostly gay-themed and LGBTQ+ posts — since at least May 12, according to an archived version of the site. It’s unclear who is responsible for it, or what is the purpose of this defacement other than pushing AI-generated slop spam. Websites hosted on official U.S. government domains have been hijacked in the past to host scam ads and hacking services.
Read more…
Source: TechCrunch News
Sign up for our Newsletter
The latest news and insights delivered right to your inbox.
Related:
- 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 ...
- Iranian APT MuddyWater targets Turkish users via malicious PDFs, executables
January 31, 2022
MuddyWater has conducted various campaigns against entities spread throughout the U.S.A, Europe, Middle East and South Asia. A typical TTP employed by the group is the heavy use of scripting in their infection chains using languages like PowerShell and Visual Basic coupled with the frequent use of living-off-the-land binaries (LoLBins). Cisco Talos recently observed a campaign operated ...
- Potential for Malicious Cyber Activities to Disrupt the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics
January 31, 2022
The FBI is warning entities associated with the February 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and March 2022 Paralympics that cyber actors could use a broad range of cyber activities to disrupt these events. These activities include distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, ransomware, malware, social engineering, data theft or leaks, phishing campaigns, disinformation campaigns, or insider ...