The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has sanctioned a Russian national for her involvement in laundering and transferring funds using virtual currency on behalf of Russian elites. Ekaterina Zhdanova reportedly played a pivotal role in assisting Russian elites and illicit actors in evading US and international sanctions, particularly by
Month: November 2023
Nov 07, 2023NewsroomCyber Threat / Malware Multiple ransomware groups have begun to actively exploit recently disclosed flaws in Atlassian Confluence and Apache ActiveMQ. Cybersecurity firm Rapid7 said it observed the exploitation of CVE-2023-22518 and CVE-2023-22515 in multiple customer environments, some of which have been leveraged for the deployment of Cerber (aka C3RB3R) ransomware. Both vulnerabilities
Microsoft has announced a major new cybersecurity initiative designed to help the company better respond to the increasing speed, scale and sophistication of today’s cyber-threats. The Secure Future Initiative has been driven in part by the growing sophistication of state-sponsored actors, in particular the Volt Typhoon campaign targeting US critical infrastructure and the more recent
ESET Research How ESET Research found a kill switch that had been used to take down one of the most prolific botnets out there 01 Nov 2023 • , 3 min. read In August 2023, the notorious Mozi botnet, infamous for exploiting vulnerabilities in hundreds of thousands of IoT devices each year, experienced a sudden
Nov 06, 2023Newsroom The U.S. Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions against a Russian woman for taking part in the laundering of virtual currency for the country’s elites and cybercriminal crews, including the Ryuk ransomware group. Ekaterina Zhdanova, per the department, is said to have facilitated large cross border transactions to assist Russian individuals to
The UK Frontier AI Taskforce, a government-funded initiative launched in April 2023 as the Foundation Model Taskforce, is evolving to become the UK AI Safety Institute. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the creation of the Institute during his closing speech at the AI Safety Summit, held in Bletchley Park, England, on November 2, 2023.
Video Various questions linger following the botnet’s sudden and deliberate demise, including: who actually initiated it? 03 Nov 2023 This week, ESET researchers described what they had aptly called “a fascinating case of cyberforensics” – the sudden and mysterious shutdown of the Mozi botnet. One of the world’s most notorious IoT botnets experienced a sudden
An advanced strain of malware masquerading as a cryptocurrency miner has managed to fly the radar for over five years, infecting no less than one million devices around the world in the process. That’s according to findings from Kaspersky, which has codenamed the threat StripedFly, describing it as an “intricate modular framework that supports both
Threat actors have compromised sensitive health data on tens of millions of US patients so far this year, according to new figures released by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The HHS said that there had been a 239% increase in “large breaches” reported to its Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the
Nov 03, 2023NewsroomCloud Security / Linux The threat actors linked to Kinsing have been observed attempting to exploit the recently disclosed Linux privilege escalation flaw called Looney Tunables as part of a “new experimental campaign” designed to breach cloud environments. “Intriguingly, the attacker is also broadening the horizons of their cloud-native attacks by extracting credentials
A new social engineering campaign conducted by the “MuddyWater” group has been observed targeting two Israeli entities with tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) previously associated with this threat actor. MuddyWater, a group known for spear-phishing emails since 2020, has historically employed links and PDFs, RTFs and HTML attachments that direct victims to archives hosted on different file-sharing
Nov 02, 2023The Hacker NewsSaaS Security / Software This new product offers SaaS discovery and risk assessment coupled with a free user access review in a unique “freemium” model Securing employees’ SaaS usage is becoming increasingly crucial for most cloud-based organizations. While numerous tools are available to address this need, they often employ different approaches
North Korean hackers suspected to be associated with the Lazarus Group have been observed targeting blockchain engineers involved in cryptocurrency exchange platforms with a new macOS malware named Kandykorn. This intrusion, tracked as REF7001 by Elastic Security Labs, utilized a combination of custom and open source capabilities to gain initial access and post-exploitation on macOS
We Live Progress Global Diversity Awareness Month is a timely occasion to reflect on the steps required to remove the obstacles to women’s participation in the security industry, as well as to consider the value of inclusion and diversity in the security workforce. 31 Oct 2023 • , 7 min. read While our digital age
A threat actor known as Prolific Puma has been maintaining a low profile and operating an underground link shortening service that’s offered to other threat actors for at least over the past four years. Prolific Puma creates “domain names with an RDGA [registered domain generation algorithm] and use these domains to provide a link shortening
Cybersecurity experts at Cisco Talos have exposed the latest operations of the espionage-driven Arid Viper advanced persistent threat (APT) group. The new campaign, active since April 2022, has been targeting Arabic-speaking Android users. According to an advisory published earlier today, the modus operandi of Arid Viper involves the deployment of customized mobile malware in the
Digital Security Cybersecurity Awareness Month draws to a close and Halloween is just around the corner, so here is a bunch of spine-tingling figures about some very real tricks and threats lurking online Phil Muncaster 30 Oct 2023 • , 4 min. read October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CSAM) in the US and Canada and
Nov 01, 2023NewsroomVulnerability / Cyber Attack F5 is warning of active abuse of a critical security flaw in BIG-IP less than a week after its public disclosure that could result in the execution of arbitrary system commands as part of an exploit chain. Tracked as CVE-2023-46747 (CVSS score: 9.8), the vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker