The U.S. sanctioned a Chinese cybersecurity company and one of its employees for exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Sophos firewalls to target U.S. organizations.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Treasury Department said Guan Tianfeng, an employee of Sichuan Silence, used the vulnerability to compromise approximately 81,000 firewalls in April 2020. The hacking campaign, detailed by Sophos in November, led to the compromise of more than 23,000 firewalls in the U.S., dozens of which were used at a government agency, and critical infrastructure companies. One of these was an energy company involved in drilling operations. The Treasury noted that the incident could have caused “significant loss in human life” if the attack had been successful.
Read more…
Source: TechCrunch
Related:
- Federal Agencies Face A New Era Of Cybersecurity Threats
April 6, 2017
Federal agencies should implement new procedures to ensure their workforce is prepared for new cybersecurity threats, warned a federal report Tuesday. The current digital era has brought about technologies that have radically changed society, and allowed for a more convenient way to complete tasks and share information. They’ve also brought new threats that make cybersecurity an ...
- WikiLeaks’ latest release of CIA cyber tools could blow cover on agency hacking operations
April 1, 2017
WikiLeaks’ latest disclosure of CIA cyber tools reveals a technique used by the agency to hide its digital tracks, potentially blowing the cover on current and past hacking operations aimed at gathering intelligence on terrorists and other foreign targets. The release on Friday of the CIA’s “Marble Framework” comes less than a month after the anti-secrecy ...
- New Mirai Variant Carries Out 54-Hour DDoS Attacks
March 30, 2017
A variant of the Mirai malware pummeled a U.S. college last month with a marathon 54-hour long attack. Researchers say this latest Mirai variant is a more potent version of the notorious Mirai malware that made headlines in October, targeting DNS provider Dyn and the Krebs on Security website. The IoT botnet behind the DDoS attacks ...
- The WikiLeaks Hacking Dump Exposed a Big Disconnect Over Cyber Security
March 29, 2017
When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange disclosed earlier this month that his anti-secrecy group had obtained CIA tools for hacking into technology products made by U.S. companies, security engineers at Cisco Systems swung into action. The WikiLeaks documents described how the Central Intelligence Agency had learned more than a year ago how to exploit flaws in Cisco’s ...
- Germany Fought Off Two Fancy Bear Cyber Attacks in 2016
March 27, 2017
Fears about Russian involvement in European elections, especially after last year’s US election, aren’t exactly unfounded or born out of paranoia. In fact, Germany says it fended off two cyber attacks coming from the same cybercriminals that targeted Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Arne Schoenbohm, a top German official, told Reuters they managed to fight off two attacks ...
- US Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Milestone
March 25, 2017
Last week the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the successful completion of the 100th iteration of the Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity training on defending systems used across the critical infrastructure sectors. Since April 2007, over 4,000 cybersecurity professionals have participated in the advanced course. These professionals represent all ...