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Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 19 May 2023
Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 19 May 2023:
-Triple Threat: Insecure Economy, Cyber Crime Recruitment and Insider Threats
-Insured Companies More Likely to be Ransomware Victims, Sometimes More Than Once
-Ensuring Security Remains/Becomes Everyone’s Responsibility
-Software Supply Chain Attacks Hit 61% of Firms
-More than 2.25 Million Exposed Assets on the Dark Web Tied to Fortune 1000 Employees
-Law Enforcement Crackdowns and New Techniques are Forcing Cyber Criminals to Pivot
-Talking Security Strategy: Why Cyber Security Requires a Seat at the Boardroom Table
-How Incident Response Rehearsals and Readiness Exercises Can Aid Incident Response
-Ransomware’s Real Goals are to Exploit Internet Facing Apps, Mine Intellectual Property and Grab Sensitive Information
-Organisations’ Cyber Resilience Efforts Fail to Keep Up with Evolving Threats
-Fraudsters Send Fake Invoice, Follow Up with Fake Executive Confirmation
-Capita Warns Customers They Should Assume Data was Stolen
Welcome to this week’s Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing – a weekly digest, collated and curated by our cyber experts to provide senior and middle management with an easy to digest round up of the most notable threats, vulnerabilities, and cyber related news from the last week.
Top Cyber Stories of the Last Week
Triple Threat: Insecure Economy, Cyber Crime Recruitment and Insider Threats
Across all sectors employees are feeling the ramifications of economic uncertainty, coupled with ransomware attacks continuing to evolve and become more sophisticated, and with this, cyber crime gangs are increasing their recruitment efforts. All the while, the cyber security skills gap persists and continues to widen for most organisations. This has the potential to create a perfect storm in terms of insider threats.
Insider threats can be malicious or unintentional, and they might come from current or former employees, business partners, board members or consultants. A recent report found that the past two years have seen a 44% rise in insider incidents. There is no quick fix to solve the insider threat problem. At a time when many businesses are struggling with visibility issues brought on by digital transformation and vendor sprawl, what’s needed is planning. Reducing the risk associated with insider threats requires a multifaceted approach.
Ensuring Security Remains/Becomes Everyone’s Responsibility
In the same way as organisations believe that everyone is somewhat responsible for keeping costs reasonable, why would an organisation not think the same of cyber security, especially as cyber security is not just a technology problem: it is a business problem. One of the best methods for ensuring that security is everyone’s responsibility is to make cyber a top-down issue, with the board and C-suite setting the tone for security; they should provide clear direction and guidance, prioritising security as a business objective.
Other methods that can help ensure security as everyone’s responsibility include integrating it into the functions of roles, creating a security culture, providing awareness and training and rewarding employees for responses such as reporting phishing attacks.
https://cisoseries.com/20-ways-to-ensure-security-remains-becomes-everyones-responsibility/
Insured Companies More Likely to be Ransomware Victims, Sometimes More Than Once
Companies with cyber insurance are more likely to get hit by ransomware, more likely to be attacked multiple times, and more likely to pay ransoms, according to a recent survey of IT decision makers.
According to the survey by Barracuda Networks, 77% of organisations with cyber insurance were hit at least once, compared to 65% without insurance. Of those with insurance, 39% paid the ransom. Worryingly, the survey found that insured companies were also 70% more likely to be hit multiple times. Repeat victims were also more likely to pay the ransom, and less likely to use backup systems to help them recover.
Software Supply Chain Attacks Hit 61% of Firms
More than three-fifths (61%) of businesses have been directly impacted by a software supply chain threat over the past year, according to a new report. The report pointed to open source software as a key source of supply chain risk. Open source is now used by 94% of companies in some form, with over half (57%) using multiple open source platforms, the report revealed.
Organisations may be putting themselves at further risk by not having a full view of the software which is used within their corporate environment. One of the first things an organisation seeking to reduce their risk of a software supply chain attack should do is to understand their attack surface and maintain a record of the software which they use.
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/software-supply-chain-attacks-hit/
More than 2.25 Million Exposed Assets on the Dark Web Tied to Fortune 1000 Employees
In a newly released 2023 Fortune 1000 Identity Exposure Report, an analysis of the dark net exposure of employees across 21 industries, including technology, financial, retailing and media, researchers analysed 2.27 billion exposed dark web assets. These assets included more than 423 million records containing personally identifiable information (PII) found in data breaches and exfiltrated from malware-infected devices tied directly to Fortune 1000 employees’ email addresses.
Additional findings include 27.48 million pairs of credentials with Fortune 1000 corporate email addresses and plain text passwords, and a 62% re-use rate of passwords amongst Fortune 1000 employees. Whilst the research focuses on Fortune 1000 employees, it is unlikely that these are the only employees who are exposed on the dark web. Organisations should be aware of how such PII could include their own employees, and how to avoid password re-use in the corporate environment.
Law Enforcement Crackdowns and New Techniques are Forcing Cyber Criminals to Pivot
Researchers say that law enforcement crackdowns and new investigative tools are putting pressure on cyber criminals, but challenges for defenders remain. It can seem like cyber criminals are running rampant across the world's digital infrastructure, launching ransomware attacks, scams, and outright thefts with impunity. Over the last year, however, US and global authorities seized $112 million from cryptocurrency investment scams, disrupted the Hive ransomware group, broke up online illegal drug marketplaces, and sanctioned crypto money launderers, among other operations to crack down on internet-enabled crimes. With such pressure, financially motivated threat actors are pivoting to crimes that have a higher rate of success, such as selling data instead of extorting, and romance scams and pig butchering (building rapport and trust with victims over time only to steal from them) are replacing the old get-rich schemes.
Talking Security Strategy: Why Cyber Security Requires a Seat at the Boardroom Table
Cyber security is no longer a fringe issue for businesses. What was once a siloed function is now woven into the fabric of any successful business. Any business still treating its cyber security initiatives as a side project is setting itself up to fail. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has laid to rest any doubts about the importance of cyber security with new regulations around how boards of directors should approach it. The regulations, which are in the process of being finalised, will require companies to openly report any serious cyber security attack and explain who on their board is responsible for dealing with it. The regulations also will require businesses to include board of directors' cyber security experience and credentials as part of any public disclosure.
How Incident Response Rehearsals and Readiness Exercises Can Aid Incident Response
Incident response rehearsals and readiness exercises can aid organisations by identifying security gaps, testing communications in the event of a cyber attack, and understanding roles in reducing response times. All of which benefits the business objectives of the organisation.
The importance for organisations to understand who their adversaries are and how they operate against their enterprise environments cannot be overstated. An organisation's approach to cyber security testing and resilience improvements in the face of an increasingly volatile threat landscape must be underpinned around this perspective.
Rehearsals should look to leverage scenarios based on evolving and emerging attacker techniques, tactics and procedures (TTPs), with different levels of complexity; this allows an organisation to constantly sharpen their technique and update rehearsals to reflect the current attack environment. These TTPs should be driven by an intelligence-led and risk-based approach. Additionally, organisations need to set metrics for understanding the results of rehearsals, which in turn should be used in established feedback channels to drive improvement in the organisation’s incident response.
https://www.darkreading.com/edge-articles/5-ways-security-testing-can-aid-incident-response
Ransomware’s Real Goals are to Exploit Internet Facing Apps, Mine Intellectual Property and Grab Sensitive Information
The majority of ransomware attacks in 2022 were intended to unearth personal data, mine intellectual property and grab other sensitive information rather than financial extortion or data encryption, Kaspersky said in a new report.
Most attacks started off as exploiting public facing applications (43%), data from compromised user accounts (24%) and malicious emails (12%). The goal was to snatch information the cyber crews could leverage into bigger and more lucrative scores. The report also revealed that the longest-running ransomware attacks began with the exploitation of public-facing applications, with just over 2% of them lasting for a year and more.
Organisations’ Cyber Resilience Efforts Fail to Keep Up with Evolving Threats
A steady increase in cyber attacks and an evolving threat landscape are resulting in more organisations turning their attention to building long-term cyber resilience; however, many of these programs are falling short and fail to prove teams’ real-world cyber capabilities, according to Immersive Labs. The report found that while 86% of organisations have a cyber resilience program, 52% of respondents say their organisation lacks a comprehensive approach to assessing cyber resilience.
Organisations have taken steps to deploy cyber resilience programs; however, 53% of respondents indicate the organisation’s workforce is not well-prepared for the next cyber attack and just over half say they lack a comprehensive approach to assessing cyber resilience. These statistics indicate that although cyber resilience is a priority and programs are in place, their current structure and training are ineffective.
https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2023/05/18/cyber-resilience-programs-shortcomings/
Fraudsters Send Fake Invoice, Follow Up with Fake Executive Confirmation
Fraudsters are trying out a new approach to convince companies to pay bogus invoices: instead of hijacking existing email threads, they are creating convincing ones themselves. The fraud attempt begins with an email containing a payment request for a fake invoice. The recipient, an employee in a company’s finance department, reads the email and checks who sent it. The sender’s email address looks like it belongs to one of the company’s trusted vendors, and the VP of Finance has been CC-ed. Soon after, the “VP of Finance” replies to the email thread, and asks the employee (by name) to pay this at the earliest convenience.
Most organisations view social engineering methods as a one step process; however, threat actors are employing multiple layers. In this case, adding management to increase authenticity. Businesses looking to bolster their resilience should look to ensure that these kinds of attacks are addressed in their organisation’s user education and awareness training.
https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2023/05/16/payment-request-fraud/
Capita Warns Customers They Should Assume Data was Stolen
Outsourcing giant Capita is warning customers to assume that their data was stolen in a cyber attack that affected its systems in early April. This includes the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), the largest private pension scheme in the UK, which holds pensions of over 500,000 individuals. A total of 350 UK corporate retirement schemes are believed to be impacted. The cyber attack, originally described to be a technical problem, has been reported to the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office.
Governance, Risk and Compliance
Cyber security Often Overlooked as Key Factor for Business Success, New Study Says - MSSP Alert
Cyber Risk Management in 2023: The People Element (trendmicro.com)
Is Your Cyber security “Too” Good? (securityintelligence.com)
Cyber risk: Can banks win the arms race? | Financial Times (ft.com)
Security breaches push digital trust to the fore | CSO Online
5 Ways Security Testing Can Aid Incident Response (darkreading.com)
Organisations reporting cyber resilience are hardly resilient: Study | CSO Online
Organisations' cyber resilience efforts fail to keep up with evolving threats - Help Net Security
Keeping a competitive edge in the cyber security ‘game’ | CyberScoop
UK NCSC, ICO debunk 6 cyber attack reporting myths | CSO Online
An Executive's Guide To The Cyber crime Underground (forbes.com)
Law enforcement crackdowns and new techniques are forcing cyber criminals to pivot | CSO Online
20 Ways to Ensure Security Remains/Becomes Everyone’s Responsibility (cisoseries.com)
Talking Security Strategy: Cyber security Has a Seat at the Boardroom Table (darkreading.com)
Triple Threat: Insecure Economy, Cyber crime Recruitment and Insider Threats - SecurityWeek
Threats
Ransomware, Extortion and Destructive Attacks
Insured companies more likely to be ransomware victims, sometimes more than once | CSO Online
Ransomware payments nearly double in one year | Cyber crime | The Guardian
The Week in Ransomware - May 12th 2023 - New Gangs Emerge (bleepingcomputer.com)
New trends in ransomware attacks shape the future of cyber security - Help Net Security
ABB 'suffers cyber attack' by ransomware gang Black Basta (techmonitor.ai)
Why Amazon S3 is a ransomware target and how to protect it | TechTarget
Experts question San Bernardino's $1.1M ransom payment | TechTarget
Ransomware corrupts data, making restoration harder • The Register
CLR SqlShell Malware Targets MS SQL Servers for Crypto Mining and Ransomware (thehackernews.com)
VPN vulnerability linked to ransomware attack on Law Society: PDPC - CNA (channelnewsasia.com)
Philadelphia Inquirer operations disrupted after cyber attack (bleepingcomputer.com)
Ransomware gang steals data of 5.8 million PharMerica patients (bleepingcomputer.com)
New RA Group ransomware targets US orgs in double-extortion attacks (bleepingcomputer.com)
Ransomware Prevention – Are Meeting Password Security Requirements Enough (bleepingcomputer.com)
Qilin Ransomware Operation Outfits Affiliates With Sleek, Turnkey Cyber attacks (darkreading.com)
Ransomware-as-a-service groups pay affiliates top dollar • The Register
Russian ransomware affiliate charged with attacks on critical infrastructure (bleepingcomputer.com)
This new ransomware group is targeting big businesses - here's what you need to know | TechRadar
Warning Issued About BianLian Ransomware Attacks By CISA & FBI (informationsecuritybuzz.com)
FBI confirms BianLian ransomware switch to extortion only attacks (bleepingcomputer.com)
'Strictly limit' remote desktop to avoid BianLian ransomware • The Register
MalasLocker ransomware targets Zimbra servers, demands charity donation (bleepingcomputer.com)
Russian national indicted for ransomware attacks against the US | CSO Online
A different kind of ransomware demand: Donate to charity to get your data back | CyberScoop
Phishing & Email Based Attacks
What the Email Security Landscape Looks Like in 2023-Security Affairs
Ongoing Facebook phishing campaign without a sender and (almost) without links
Google's .zip Top Level domain is already used in phishing attacks - gHacks Tech News
New ZIP domains spark debate among cyber security experts (bleepingcomputer.com)
Exploring the tactics of phishing and scam websites in 2023 - Help Net Security
Trojan-Rigged Phishing Attacks Pepper China-Taiwan Conflict (darkreading.com)
Other Social Engineering; Smishing, Vishing, etc
Fraudsters send fake invoice, follow up with fake exec confirmation - Help Net Security
Insider threats surge across US CNI as attackers exploit human factors | CSO Online
Microsoft Teams Features Amp Up Orgs' Cyber attack Exposure (darkreading.com)
Researchers show ways to abuse Microsoft Teams accounts for lateral movement | CSO Online
Artificial Intelligence
New Google search tool will distinguish real images from AI-generated phonies | ZDNET
AI-Powered Tools Threaten Password Strength, New Study Finds - MSSP Alert
AI Is About to Be Everywhere: Where Will Regulators Be? (darkreading.com)
Generative AI Empowers Users but Challenges Security (darkreading.com)
Security Vulnerabilities of ChatGPT-Generated Code (trendmicro.com)
3 Ways Hackers Use ChatGPT to Cause Security Headaches (darkreading.com)
ChatGPT is about to revolutionize cyber security | VentureBeat
Mitigating Dark Web Risks: The Role Of AI And Machine Learning (forbes.com)
2FA/MFA
Malware
Microsoft is scanning the inside of password-protected zip files for malware | Ars Technica
XWorm Malware Exploits Follina Vulnerability in New Wave of Attacks (thehackernews.com)
Atomic malware steals Mac passwords, crypto wallets, and more • Graham Cluley
CLR SqlShell Malware Targets MS SQL Servers for Crypto Mining and Ransomware (thehackernews.com)
No more macros? No problem, say attackers, we'll adapt • The Register
The new info-stealing malware operations to watch out for (bleepingcomputer.com)
DangerousPassword - A Malware Attack Pattern to Infect Devices (gbhackers.com)
Stealthy MerDoor malware uncovered after five years of attacks (bleepingcomputer.com)
Hackers Using Golang Variant of Cobalt Strike to Target Apple macOS Systems (thehackernews.com)
New ZIP domains spark debate among cyber security experts (bleepingcomputer.com)
Infamous cyber crime marketplace offers pre-order service for stolen credentials - Help Net Security
Once Again, Malware Discovered Hidden in npm (darkreading.com)
Trojan-Rigged Phishing Attacks Pepper China-Taiwan Conflict (darkreading.com)
Mobile
Parental control app with 5 million downloads vulnerable to attacks (bleepingcomputer.com)
Apple blocked 1.7 million apps for privacy, security issues in 2022 (bleepingcomputer.com)
Converso walks back E2EE claims, yanks app from stores • The Register
OilAlpha: Emerging Houthi-linked Cyber Threat Targets Arabian Android Users (thehackernews.com)
Google Announces New Rating System for Android and Device Vulnerability Reports - SecurityWeek
Millions of Smartphones Distributed Worldwide With Preinstalled 'Guerrilla' Malware - SecurityWeek
Botnets
Latest variant of RapperBot botnet adds cryptojacking capabilities-Security Affairs
Spanish cops arrest 69 in immigration bot scheme • The Register
Denial of Service/DoS/DDOS
Internet of Things – IoT
Netgear Routers' Flaws Expose Users to Malware, Remote Attacks, and Surveillance (thehackernews.com)
Why 2.4GHz Wi-Fi is both the savior and the scourge of the smart home - The Verge
Hackers infect TP-Link router firmware to attack EU entities (bleepingcomputer.com)
Chinese Hackers Mustang Panda Attacks TP-Link Routers (informationsecuritybuzz.com)
Unpatched Wemo Smart Plug Bug Opens Countless Networks to Cyber attacks (darkreading.com)
Is your car safe from a cyber attack? | E&T Magazine (theiet.org)
Data Breaches/Leaks
UK's largest private pension scheme hit by Capita attack • The Register
Capita warns customers they should assume data was stolen (bleepingcomputer.com)
More than 2.25 Million Exposed Assets on the Dark Web Tied to Fortune 1000 Employees - MSSP Alert
MP’s laptop stolen from Welcome Break spot 'not covered by CCTV' | UK News | Metro News
Discord discloses data breach after support agent got hacked (bleepingcomputer.com)
Data of 237,000 US government employees breached - CNA (channelnewsasia.com)
Toyota: Car location data of 2 million customers exposed for ten years (bleepingcomputer.com)
Toyota's bungling of customer privacy is becoming a pattern • The Register
WordPress Plugin Vulnerability Exposed Ferrari Website to Hackers - SecurityWeek
Personal info of 90k hikers leaked by French tourism company La Malle Postale-Security Affairs
Ransomware gang steals data of 5.8 million PharMerica patients (bleepingcomputer.com)
Airline exposes passenger info to others due to a 'technical error' (bleepingcomputer.com)
University admission platform exposed student passports-Security Affairs
Millions of deleted files recovered in hard drives purchased online | TechRadar
Organised Crime & Criminal Actors
Law enforcement crackdowns and new techniques are forcing cyber criminals to pivot | CSO Online
An Executive's Guide To The Cyber crime Underground (forbes.com)
Hacker marketplace still active despite police 'takedown' claim - BBC News
How Cyber criminals Adapted to Microsoft Blocking Macros by Default (darkreading.com)
Darknet Carding Kingpin Pleads Guilty: Sold Financial Info of Tens of Thousands (thehackernews.com)
Cryptocurrency/Cryptomining/Cryptojacking/NFTs/Blockchain
Atomic malware steals Mac passwords, crypto wallets, and more • Graham Cluley
Hacker admits he was connected to 'tens of thousands’ laptops to mine crypto (finbold.com)
CLR SqlShell Malware Targets MS SQL Servers for Crypto Mining and Ransomware (thehackernews.com)
Latest variant of RapperBot botnet adds cryptojacking capabilities-Security Affairs
North Korean hackers stole $721 million in cryptocurrency from Japan - Nikkei | Reuters
DangerousPassword - A Malware Attack Pattern to Infect Devices (gbhackers.com)
Landmark crypto rules make exchanges liable for customer losses in EU | Ars Technica
Insider Risk and Insider Threats
Triple Threat: Insecure Economy, Cyber crime Recruitment and Insider Threats - SecurityWeek
Avoiding Reputational Damage By Conquering Insider Threats (informationsecuritybuzz.com)
Insider threats surge across US CNI as attackers exploit human factors | CSO Online
Ex-Apple engineer accused of stealing self-driving car secrets - BBC News
Identity crimes: Too many victims, limited resources - Help Net Security
Fraud, Scams & Financial Crime
Fraudsters send fake invoice, follow up with fake exec confirmation - Help Net Security
Exploring the tactics of phishing and scam websites in 2023 - Help Net Security
How To Avoid Mother's Day Scams By Protecting Your Purse And Heart (informationsecuritybuzz.com)
Spanish cops arrest 69 in immigration bot scheme • The Register
Admin of the darknet carding platform Skynet Market pleads guilty-Security Affairs
18-year-old charged with hacking 60,000 sports betting accounts (bleepingcomputer.com)
AML/CFT/Sanctions
Insurance
Dark Web
Hacker marketplace still active despite police 'takedown' claim - BBC News
Infamous cyber crime marketplace offers pre-order service for stolen credentials - Help Net Security
Darknet Carding Kingpin Pleads Guilty: Sold Financial Info of Tens of Thousands (thehackernews.com)
Mitigating Dark Web Risks: The Role Of AI And Machine Learning (forbes.com)
Supply Chain and Third Parties
Capita warns customers they should assume data was stolen (bleepingcomputer.com)
Capita hit by new data breach incident | Financial Times (ft.com)
Another security calamity for Capita: Unsecured AWS bucket • The Register
UK's largest private pension scheme hit by Capita attack • The Register
Discord Informs Users of Data Breach Involving Customer Support Provider - SecurityWeek
Preparing for federal supply chain security standardization - Help Net Security
Software Supply Chain
Cloud/SaaS
Security experts share cloud auditing best practices | TechTarget
Stop worrying about cloud-lock-in, and outages: Gartner • The Register
Microsoft Azure VMs Hijacked in Cloud Cyber attack (darkreading.com)
Why High Tech Companies Struggle with SaaS Security (thehackernews.com)
Capita hit by new data breach incident | Financial Times (ft.com)
Why Amazon S3 is a ransomware target and how to protect it | TechTarget
Microsoft lets Azure AD choose authentication method • The Register
Encryption
Converso walks back E2EE claims, yanks app from stores • The Register
Protect against current and future threats with encryption | TechTarget
API
Open Source
EU attempts to secure software could hurt open source • The Register
CISA: Several Old Linux Vulnerabilities Exploited in Attacks - SecurityWeek
Open-source Cobalt Strike port 'Geacon' used in macOS attacks (bleepingcomputer.com)
Malicious open-source components threatening digital infrastructure - Help Net Security
Passwords, Credential Stuffing & Brute Force Attacks
Time Taken For Hackers to Crack Passwords Revealed - IT Security Guru
AI-Powered Tools Threaten Password Strength, New Study Finds - MSSP Alert
Passkeys may not be for you, but they are safe and easy—here’s why | Ars Technica
Ransomware Prevention – Are Meeting Password Security Requirements Enough (bleepingcomputer.com)
KeePass 2.X Master Password Dumper allows retrieving the KeePass master password-Security Affairs
Social Media
Former TikTok official says China had access to app data | Al Arabiya English
Ongoing Facebook phishing campaign without a sender and (almost) without links
Twitter wrong to block tweets during Turkey election - Wikipedia founder - BBC News
Twitter sued over Saudi spying that allegedly landed popular user in prison [Updated] | Ars Technica
Training, Education and Awareness
Parental Controls and Child Safety
Regulations, Fines and Legislation
EU attempts to secure software could hurt open source • The Register
AI Is About to Be Everywhere: Where Will Regulators Be? (darkreading.com)
Preparing for federal supply chain security standardization - Help Net Security
Secure Disposal
Careers, Working in Cyber and Information Security
Open source and Linux skills are still in demand in a dark economy | ZDNET
Top 10 Ideas for Addressing the Cyber security Skills Gap in 2023 (analyticsinsight.net)
Google Cloud CISO on why the Google Cyber security Certificate matters - Help Net Security
Law Enforcement Action and Take Downs
Law enforcement crackdowns and new techniques are forcing cyber criminals to pivot | CSO Online
Hacker marketplace still active despite police 'takedown' claim - BBC News
Spanish cops arrest 69 in immigration bot scheme • The Register
Identity crimes: Too many victims, limited resources - Help Net Security
Darknet Carding Kingpin Pleads Guilty: Sold Financial Info of Tens of Thousands (thehackernews.com)
Admin of the darknet carding platform Skynet Market pleads guilty-Security Affairs
18-year-old charged with hacking 60,000 sports betting accounts (bleepingcomputer.com)
Russian national indicted for ransomware attacks against the US | CSO Online
Privacy, Surveillance and Mass Monitoring
The UK’s Secretive Web Surveillance Program Is Ramping Up | WIRED
WhatsApp allows users to lock sensitive chats - Help Net Security
Apple blocked 1.7 million apps for privacy, security issues in 2022 (bleepingcomputer.com)
Google details its next steps for wiping out Chrome tracking cookies | Engadget
Misinformation, Disinformation and Propaganda
Pakistan shut down the internet - but that didn't stop the protests - BBC News
Twitter wrong to block tweets during Turkey election - Wikipedia founder - BBC News
Spyware, Cyber Espionage & Cyber Warfare, including Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Nation State Actors
Former TikTok official says China had access to app data | Al Arabiya English
Gatewatcher unveils research into advanced persistent threats | Data Centre Solutions
How China came to dominate the black market for money laundering (telegraph.co.uk)
North Korean hackers stole $721 million in cryptocurrency from Japan - Nikkei | Reuters
Hackers infect TP-Link router firmware to attack EU entities (bleepingcomputer.com)
Chinese Hackers Mustang Panda Attacks TP-Link Routers (informationsecuritybuzz.com)
Cyble — Cisco Routers Exploited by Russian State-Sponsored Attackers
DOJ links Iran, China and Russia to five IP theft-related cases | SC Media (scmagazine.com)
Trojan-Rigged Phishing Attacks Pepper China-Taiwan Conflict (darkreading.com)
Vulnerability Management
Microsoft will take nearly a year to finish patching new 0-day Secure Boot bug | Ars Technica
Remote updates on motherboards could lead to bricked servers • The Register
Hacking Groups Rapidly Weaponizing N-Day Vulnerabilities (gbhackers.com)
CISA: Several Old Linux Vulnerabilities Exploited in Attacks - SecurityWeek
How to build a better vulnerability management program | TechTarget
Google Announces New Rating System for Android and Device Vulnerability Reports - SecurityWeek
How to Protect Your Organisation From Vulnerabilities (darkreading.com)
Vulnerabilities
Hackers target Wordpress plugin flaw after PoC exploit released (bleepingcomputer.com)
Critical Flaws in Cisco Small Business Switches Could Allow Remote Attacks (thehackernews.com)
KeePass flaw allows retrieval of master password, PoC is public (CVE-2023-32784) - Help Net Security
Apple fixes three new zero-days exploited to hack iPhones, Macs (bleepingcomputer.com)
XWorm Malware Exploits Follina Vulnerability in New Wave of Attacks (thehackernews.com)
Details Disclosed for Exploit Chain That Allows Hacking of Netgear Routers - SecurityWeek
Arm confident Cortex-M is secure after side-channel attack • The Register
Microsoft Follina Bug Is Back in Meme-Themed Cyber attacks Against Travel Orgs (darkreading.com)
CISA: Several Old Linux Vulnerabilities Exploited in Attacks - SecurityWeek
Remote updates on motherboards could lead to bricked servers • The Register
Microsoft will take nearly a year to finish patching new 0-day Secure Boot bug | Ars Technica
Microsoft pulls Defender update fixing Windows LSA Protection bug (bleepingcomputer.com)
WordPress 6.2.1 Released with Fixes for 5 Security Vulnerabilities – WP Tavern
Cisco Says PoC Exploits Available for Newly Patched Enterprise Switch Vulnerabilities - SecurityWeek
Tools and Controls
Organisations' cyber resilience efforts fail to keep up with evolving threats - Help Net Security
Hacking Groups Rapidly Weaponizing N-Day Vulnerabilities (gbhackers.com)
5 Ways Security Testing Can Aid Incident Response (darkreading.com)
Organisations reporting cyber resilience are hardly resilient: Study | CSO Online
Passkeys may not be for you, but they are safe and easy—here’s why | Ars Technica
The Ultimate Guide to Multi-Factor Authentication - Security Boulevard
Open-source Cobalt Strike port 'Geacon' used in macOS attacks (bleepingcomputer.com)
Protect against current and future threats with encryption | TechTarget
Can AI Decision-Making Be Trusted for Cyber security? (analyticsinsight.net)
'Strictly limit' remote desktop to avoid BianLian ransomware • The Register
Millions of deleted files recovered in hard drives purchased online | TechRadar
Key Metrics In Evaluating DevOps Threat Matrix (informationsecuritybuzz.com)
ChatGPT is about to revolutionize cyber security | VentureBeat
A Requirements-Driven Approach to Cyber Threat Intelligence | Mandiant
Embedding Security by Design: A Shared Responsibility (darkreading.com)
Reports Published in the Last Week
Other News
Heightened cyber attacks threat before Council of Europe summit in Reykjavik – EURACTIV.com
12 common network protocols and their functions explained | TechTarget
Pentagon Hacking Fears Fueled by Microsoft's Monopoly on Military IT (newsweek.com)
Ukraine, Ireland, Japan and Iceland join NATO CCDCOE-Security Affairs
Web entity activity reveals insights into internet security - Help Net Security
Microsoft Security highlights from RSAC 2023 - Microsoft Security Blog
Top 5 Cyber security Predictions and Statistics for 2023 (analyticsinsight.net)
No more macros? No problem, say attackers, we'll adapt • The Register
Researchers show ways to abuse Microsoft Teams accounts for lateral movement | CSO Online
Rebinding Attacks Persist With Spotty Browser Defences (darkreading.com)
Sector Specific
Industry specific threat intelligence reports are available.
Contact us to receive tailored reports specific to the industry/sector and geographies you operate in.
· Automotive
· Construction
· Critical National Infrastructure (CNI)
· Defence & Space
· Education & Academia
· Energy & Utilities
· Estate Agencies
· Financial Services
· FinTech
· Food & Agriculture
· Gaming & Gambling
· Government & Public Sector (including Law Enforcement)
· Health/Medical/Pharma
· Hotels & Hospitality
· Insurance
· Legal
· Manufacturing
· Maritime
· Oil, Gas & Mining
· OT, ICS, IIoT, SCADA & Cyber-Physical Systems
· Retail & eCommerce
· Small and Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs)
· Startups
· Telecoms
· Third Sector & Charities
· Transport & Aviation
· Web3
As usual, contact us to help assess where your risks lie and to ensure you are doing all you can do to keep you and your business secure.
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Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 23 September 2022
Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 23 September 2022:
-Cyber Insurers Clamp Down on Clients' Self-Attestation of Security Controls
-Survey Shows CISOs Losing Confidence in Ability to Stop Ransomware Attacks
-MFA Fatigue: Hackers’ New Favourite Tactic In High-Profile Breaches
-Credential Stuffing Accounts For One-third Of Global Login Attempts, Okta Finds
-Ransomware Operators Might Be Dropping File Encryption In Favour Of Corrupting Files
-Revolut Hack Exposes Data Of 50,000 Users, Fuels New Phishing Wave
-Researchers Say Insider Threats Play A Larger Role In Security Incidents
-SMBs vs. Large Enterprises: Not All Compromises Are Created Equal
-Cyber Attack Costs for Businesses up by 80%
-Morgan Stanley Fined $35m By SEC For Data Security Lapse, Sold Devices Full of Customer PII
-Eyeglass Reflections Can Leak Information During Video Calls
-Uber Says It Was Likely Hacked by Teenage Hacker Gang LAPSUS$
Welcome to this week’s Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing – a weekly digest, collated and curated by our cyber experts to provide senior and middle management with an easy to digest round up of the most notable threats, vulnerabilities, and cyber related news from the last week.
Top Cyber Stories of the Last Week
Cyber Insurers Clamp Down on Clients' Self-Attestation of Security Controls
After one company suffered a breach that could have been headed off by the MFA it claimed to have, insurers are looking to confirm claimed cyber security measures.
A voided lawsuit from a cyber insurance carrier claiming its customer misled it on its insurance application could potentially pave the way to change how underwriters evaluate self-attestation claims on insurance applications.
The case — Travelers Property Casualty Company of America v. International Control Services Inc. (ICS) — hinged on ICS claiming it had multifactor authentication (MFA) in place when the electronics manufacturer applied for a policy. In May the company experienced a ransomware attack. Forensics investigators determined there was no MFA in place, so Travelers asserted it should not be liable for the claim. The case was filed in the US District Court for the Central District of Illinois on July 6 and at the end of August, the litigants agreed to void the contract, ending ICS's efforts to have its insurer cover its losses.
This case was unusual in that Travelers maintained the misrepresentation "materially affected the acceptance of the risk and/or the hazard assumed by Travelers" in the court filing. Taking a client to court is a departure from other similar cases where an insurance company simply denied the claim.
Sean O'Brien of Yale Law School notes that security should be proactive, stopping possible breaches before they occur rather than simply responding to each successful attack. The insurance industry is likely to become more and more pernickety as cyber security claims rise, defending their bottom line and avoiding reimbursement wherever possible. This has always been the role of insurance adjusters, of course, and their business is in many ways adversarial to your organisation's interests after the dust settles from a cyber attack.
That said, organisations should not expect a payout for poor cyber security policies and practices, he notes.
Survey Shows CISOs Losing Confidence in Ability to Stop Ransomware Attacks
Despite an 86% surge in budget resources to defend against ransomware, 90% of organisations were impacted by attacks last year, a survey reveals.
An annual survey of CISOs from Canada, the UK, and US reveals that security teams are starting to lose hope that they can defend against the next ransomware attack. The survey was conducted by SpyCloud, and it showed that although budgets to protect against cyber attacks have swelled by 86%, a full 90% of organisations surveyed said they had been impacted by a ransomware over the past year.
More organisations have implemented 'Plan B' measures this year, from opening cryptocurrency accounts to purchasing ransomware insurance. These findings suggest that organisations realise threats are slipping through their defences and a ransomware attack is inevitable.
The survey did show some bright spots on the cyber security front — nearly three-quarters of those organisations surveyed are using multifactor authentication (MFA), with an increase from 44% to 73% year-over-year. The report added that respondents said they are focused on stopping credential-stealing malware, particularly on unmanaged network devices.
MFA Fatigue: Hackers’ New Favourite Tactic in High-Profile Breaches
Hackers are more frequently using social engineering attacks to gain access to corporate credentials and breach large networks. One component of these attacks that is becoming more popular with the rise of multi-factor authentication is a technique called MFA Fatigue.
When breaching corporate networks, hackers commonly use stolen employee login credentials to access VPNs and the internal network. The reality is that obtaining corporate credentials is far from difficult for threat actors, who can use various methods, including phishing attacks, malware, leaked credentials from data breaches, or purchasing them on dark web marketplaces.
To counter this, enterprises have increasingly adopted multi-factor authentication to prevent users from logging into a network without first entering an additional form of verification. This additional information can be a one-time passcode, a prompt asking you to verify the login attempt, or the use of hardware security keys.
While threat actors can use numerous methods to bypass multi-factor authentication, most revolve around stealing cookies through malware or man-in-the-middle phishing attack frameworks. However, a social engineering technique called 'MFA Fatigue' is growing more popular with threat actors as it does not require malware or phishing infrastructure and has proven to be successful in attacks.
An MFA Fatigue attack is when a threat actor runs a script that attempts to log in with stolen credentials over and over, causing what feels like an endless stream of MFA push requests to be sent to the account's owner's mobile device. The goal is to keep this up, day and night, to break down the target's cyber security posture and inflict a sense of "fatigue" regarding these MFA prompts.
Credential Stuffing Accounts for One-third Of Global Login Attempts
Okta’s global State of Secure Identity Report has found that credential stuffing is the top threat against customer accounts, outpacing legitimate login traffic in some countries. The report presents trends, examples and observations unearthed from the billions of authentications on Okta’s Auth0 platform.
Credential stuffing is when attacks take advantage of the practice of password reuse. It begins with a stolen login or password pair, then threat actors use these credentials across other common sites, using automated tooling used to “stuff” credential pairs into login forms. When an account holder reuses the same (or similar) passwords on multiple sites, it creates a domino effect in which a single credential pair can be used to breach multiple applications.
Across all industries globally, Okta found there were almost 10 billion credential stuffing attempts in the first 90 days of 2022, which amounts to 34% of authentication traffic.
Ransomware Operators Might Be Dropping File Encryption in Favour of Corrupting Files
Corrupting files is faster, cheaper, and less likely to be stopped by endpoint protection tools than encrypting them.
A recent attack that involved a threat actor believed to be an affiliate of the BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation was found to use a data exfiltration tool dubbed Exmatter. Exmatter is a tool that allows attackers to scan the victim computer's drives for files with certain extensions and then upload them to an attacker-controlled server in a unique directory created for every victim. The tool supports several exfiltration methods including FTP, SFTP, and webDAV.
The way the Eraser function works is that it loads two random files from the list into memory and then copies a random chunk from the second file to the beginning of the first file overwriting its original contents. This doesn't technically erase the file but rather corrupts it. The researchers believe this feature is still being developed because the command that calls the Eraser function is not yet fully implemented and the function’s code still has some inefficiencies. Since the selected data chunk is random, it can sometimes be very small, which makes some files more recoverable than others.
Why destroy files by overwriting them with random data instead of deploying ransomware to encrypt them? At a first glance these seem like similar file manipulation operations. Encrypting a file involves overwriting it, one block at a time, with random-looking data (the ciphertext). However, there are ways to detect these encryption operations when done in great succession and many endpoint security programs can now detect when a process exhibits this behaviour and can stop it. Meanwhile, the kind of file overwriting that Exmatter does is much more subtle.
The act of using legitimate file data from the victim machine to corrupt other files may be a technique to avoid heuristic-based detection for ransomware and wipers, as copying file data from one file to another is much more plausibly benign functionality compared to sequentially overwriting files with random data or encrypting them.
Another reason is that encrypting files is a more intensive task that takes a longer time. It's also much harder and costly to implement file encryption programs, which ransomware essentially are, without bugs or flaws that researchers could exploit to reverse the encryption. There have been many cases over the years where researchers found weaknesses in ransomware encryption implementations and were able to release decryptors. This has happened to BlackMatter, the Ransomwware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operation with which the Exmatter tool has been originally associated.
With data exfiltration now the norm among threat actors, developing stable, secure, and fast ransomware to encrypt files is a redundant and costly endeavour compared to corrupting files and using the exfiltrated copies as the means of data recovery.
It remains to be seen if this is the start of a trend where ransomware affiliates switch to data destruction instead of encryption, ensuring the only copy is in their possession, or if it's just an isolated incident where BlackMatter/BlackCat affiliates want to avoid mistakes of the past. However, data theft and extortion attacks that involve destruction are not new and have been widespread in the cloud database space. Attackers have hit unprotected S3 buckets, MongoDB databases, Redis instances, and ElasticSearch indexes for years, deleting their contents and leaving behind ransom notes so it wouldn't be a surprise to see this move to on-premises systems as well.
Revolut Hack Exposes Data Of 50,000 Users, Fuels New Phishing Wave
Revolut has suffered a cyber attack that gave an unauthorised third party access to personal information of tens of thousands of clients. The incident occurred over a week ago, on Sunday night, and has been described as "highly targeted."
Founded in 2015, Revolut is a financial technology company that has seen a rapid growth, now offering banking, money management, and investment services to customers all over the world. In a statement a company spokesperson said that an unauthorised party had access "for a short period of time" to details of only a 0.16% of its customers.
"We immediately identified and isolated the attack to effectively limit its impact and have contacted those customers affected. Customers who have not received an email have not been impacted" , Revolut said.
According to the breach disclosure to the State Data Protection Inspectorate in Lithuania, where Revolut has a banking license, 50,150 customers have been impacted. Based on the information from Revolut, the agency said that the number of affected customers in the European Economic Area is 20,687, and just 379 Lithuanian citizens are potentially impacted by this incident.
Details on how the threat actor gained access to the database have not been disclosed but it appears that the attacker relied on social engineering. The Lithuanian data protection agency notes that the likely exposed information includes:
Email addresses
Full names
Postal addresses
Phone numbers
Limited payment card data
Account data
However, in a message to an affected customer, Revolut says that the type of compromised personal data varies for different customers. Card details, PINs, or passwords were not accessed.
Researchers Say Insider Threats Play a Larger Role In Security Incidents
Insider threats are becoming an increasingly common part of the attack chain, with malicious insiders and unwitting assets playing critical roles in incidents over the past year, according to Cisco Talos research.
In a blog post, Cisco Talos researchers said organisations can mitigate these types of risks via education, user-access control, and ensuring proper processes and procedures are in place when and if employees leave the organisation.
There are a variety of reasons a user may choose to become a malicious insider, and unfortunately many of them are occurring today. The most obvious being financial distress, where a user has a lot of debt and selling the ability to infect their employer can be a tempting avenue. There have been examples of users trying to sell access into employer networks for more than a decade, having spotted them on dark web forums. The current climate, with the economy tilting toward recession, is ripe for this type of abuse.
The cyber crime underground remains a hot spot for insider threat recruitment efforts because of the relative anonymity, accessibility, and low barrier of entry it affords. Malicious actors use forums and instant messaging platforms to advertise their insider services or, vice versa, to recruit accomplices for specific schemes that require insider access or knowledge.
By far, the most popular motivation for insider threats is financial gain. There are plenty of examples of financially-motivated threat actors seeking employees at companies to provide data and access to sell in the underground or leverage against the organisation or its customers. There have also been instances where individuals turn to underground forums and instant messaging platforms claiming to be employees at notable organisations to sell company information.
SMBs vs. Large Enterprises: Not All Compromises Are Created Equal
Attackers view smaller organisations as having fewer security protocols in place, therefore requiring less effort to compromise. Lumu has found that compromise is significantly different for small businesses than for medium-sized and large enterprises.
There is no silver bullet for organisations to protect themselves from compromise, but there are critical steps to take to understand your potential exposure and make sure that your cyber security protocols are aligned accordingly.
Compromise often stay undetected for long periods of time – 201 days on average with compromise detection and containment taking approximately 271 days. It’s critical for smaller businesses to know they are more susceptible and to get ahead of the curve with safeguards.
Results from the Lumu Ransomware Assessment show a few reasons why attacks continue to stay undetected for such long periods of time:
· 58% of organisations aren’t monitoring roaming devices, which is concerning with a workforce that has embraced remote working
· 72% of organisations either don’t or only partially monitor the use of network resources and traffic, which is problematic given that most compromises tend to originate from within the network
· Crypto-mining doesn’t appear to be a concern for the majority of organisations as 76% either do not know or only partially know how to identify it; however, this is a commonly used technique for cyber criminals
Additionally, threat data unveils attack techniques used and how they vary based on the size of the organisation.
Small businesses are primarily targeted by malware attacks (60%) and are also at greater risk of Malware, Command and Control, and Crypto-Mining. Medium-sized businesses and large enterprises don’t see as much malware and are more susceptible to Domain Generated Algorithms (DGA). This type of attack allows adversaries to dynamically identify a destination domain for command and control traffic rather than relying on a list of static IP addresses or domains.
https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/09/22/smaller-organizations-security-protocols/
Cyber Attack Costs for Businesses up by 80%
In seven out of eight countries, cyber attacks are now seen as the biggest risk to business — outranking COVID-19, economic turmoil, skills shortages, and other issues. The "Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report 2022," which assesses how prepared businesses are to fight back against cyber incidents and breaches, polled more than 5,000 corporate cyber security professionals in the US, UK, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, and the Netherlands. These experts had some enlightening things to say.
According to the report, IT pros are more worried about cyber attacks (46%) than the pandemic (43%) or skills shortages (38%). And the data prove it. The survey indicates that in the past 12 months, US businesses weathered a 7% increase in cyber attacks. Approximately half of all US businesses (47%) suffered an attack in the past year.
Remote work has caused many smaller organisations to use cloud solutions instead of utilizing in-house IT services. However, with more cloud applications and APIs in use, the attack surface has broadened, too, making these organisations more vulnerable to cyber crime.
Although the proportion of staff working remotely almost halved in the past year — from 62% of the workforce in 2021 to 39% in 2022 — overall IT expenditures doubled, from $11.5 million in 2021 to $24.2 million this year. "Despite 61% of survey respondents now being back in the office, businesses are still experiencing a hangover from the pandemic," Hiscox said in a statement. "Remote working provided a year-long Christmas for cyber criminals, and we can see the results of their cyber-feast in the increased frequency and cost of attacks. As we move into a new era of hybrid working, we all have an increased responsibility to continue learning, and managing our own cyber security."
It may come as no surprise that as more organisations evolve and scale their digital business models, the median cost of an attack has surged — from $10,000 last year to $18,000 in 2022. The US is bearing the brunt of generally higher cyber attack costs, with 40% of attack victims incurring costs of $25,000 or higher. The most common vulnerability — i.e., the entry point for cyber criminals — was a cloud-based corporate server.
However, in terms of attack costs, the report reveals major regional disparities. While one organisation in the UK suffered total attack costs of $6.7 million, the hardest-hit firms in Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands paid out more than $5 million. In turn, Belgium, France, Germany, and Spain all experienced stable or lower median costs.
https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/cyberattack-costs-for-us-businesses-up-by-80-
Morgan Stanley Fined $35m By SEC For Data Security Lapse, Sold Devices Full of Customer PII
American financial services giant Morgan Stanley agreed to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) a $35m penalty on Tuesday over data security lapses.
According to the SEC's complaint, the firm would have allowed roughly 1000 unencrypted hard drives (HDDs) and about 8000 backup tapes from decommissioned data centres to be resold on auction sites without first being wiped.
The improper disposal of the devices reportedly started in 2016 and per the SEC complaint, was part of an "extensive failure" that exposed 15 million customers' data.
In fact, instead of destroying the hard drives or employing an internal IT team to erase them, Morgan Stanley would have contracted an unnamed third–party moving company with allegedly no experience in decommissioning storage media to take care of the hardware.
The moving company initially subcontracted an IT firm to wipe the drives, but their business relationship went sour, so the mover started selling the storage devices to another firm that auctioned them online without erasing them.
"This is an astonishing security mistake by one of the world's most prestigious banks, who would be expected to have well–established procedures in system life cycle management," Jordan Schroeder, managing CISO at Barrier Networks, told Infosecurity Magazine.
"Not only does the situation mean that the bank put customer data at risk, but it also demonstrates the organisation was not following an expected policy which explained the secure disposing of IT equipment."
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/morgan-stanley-pay-dollar35m-sec/
Eyeglass Reflections Can Leak Information During Video Calls
A group of academic researchers have devised a method of reconstructing text exposed via participants’ eyeglasses and other reflective objects during video conferences.
Zoom and other video conferencing tools, which have been widely adopted over the past couple of years as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, may be used by attackers to leak information unintentionally reflected in objects such as eyeglasses, the researchers say.
Using mathematical modelling and human subjects experiments, this research explores the extent to which emerging webcams might leak recognizable textual and graphical information gleaming from eyeglass reflections captured by webcams.
Dubbed ‘webcam peeking attack’, a threat model devised by academics shows that it is possible to obtain an accuracy of over 75% when reconstructing and recognizing text with heights as small as 10 mm, captured by a 720p webcam.
According to the academics, attackers can also rely on webcam peeking to identify the websites that the victims are using. Moreover, they believe that 4k webcams will allow attackers to easily reconstruct most header texts on popular websites.
To mitigate the risk posed by webcam peeking attacks, the researchers propose both near- and long-term mitigations, including the use of software that can blur the eyeglass areas of the video stream. Some video conferencing solutions already offer blurring capabilities, albeit not fine-tuned.
https://www.securityweek.com/eyeglass-reflections-can-leak-information-during-video-calls
Uber Says It Was Likely Hacked by Teenage Hacker Gang LAPSUS$
Uber has published additional information about how it was hacked, claiming that it was targeted by LAPSUS$, a cyber criminal gang with a hefty track record that is thought to be composed largely of teenagers.
Last week, someone broke into Uber’s network and used the access to cause all sorts of chaos. The culprit, who claims to be 18 years old, managed to spam company staff with vulgar Slack messages, post a picture of a penis on the company’s internal websites, and leak images of Uber’s internal environment to the web. Now, the ride-share giant has released a statement providing details on its ordeal.
In its update, the company has clarified how it was hacked, largely confirming an account made by the hacker themself. Uber says that the hacker exploited the login credentials of a company contractor to initially gain access to the network. The hacker may have originally bought access to those credentials via the dark web, Uber says. The hacker then used them to make multiple login attempts to the contractor’s account. The login attempts prompted a slew of multi-factor authentication requests for the contractor, who ultimately authenticated one of them. The hacker has previously claimed that it conducted a social engineering scheme to convince the contractor to authenticate the login attempt.
Security experts have called this an “MFA fatigue” attack. This increasingly common intrusion tactic seeks to overwhelm a victim with authentication push requests until they validate the hacker’s illegitimate login attempt.
Most interestingly, Uber has also claimed that whoever was behind this hacking episode is affiliated with the cyber crime gang “LAPSUS$.” It’s not totally clear how Uber knows that.
https://gizmodo.com/uber-says-it-was-hacked-by-teenage-hacker-gang-lapsus-1849554679
Threats
Ransomware and Extortion
Microsoft SQL servers hacked in TargetCompany ransomware attacks (bleepingcomputer.com)
BlackCat ransomware’s data exfiltration tool gets an upgrade (bleepingcomputer.com)
SpyCloud Report: 90% of Companies Affected by Ransomware in 2022 - MSSP Alert
Netflix-style Ransomware Makes Your Organisation’s Data The Prize In A (informationsecuritybuzz.com)
LockBit ransomware builder leaked online by “angry developer” (bleepingcomputer.com)
How to Prevent Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) Attacks (trendmicro.com)
The Risk of Ransomware Supply Chain Attacks (trendmicro.com)
Europol and Bitdefender Release Free Decryptor for LockerGoga Ransomware (thehackernews.com)
Vice Society Demands Ransom From LAUSD Two Weeks After Hack (gizmodo.com)
Phishing & Email Based Attacks
Microsoft: Exchange servers hacked via OAuth apps for phishing (bleepingcomputer.com)
LinkedIn Smart Links abused in evasive email phishing attacks (bleepingcomputer.com)
BBC Warns Of Cost-of-living Phishing, Expert Weighs In (informationsecuritybuzz.com)
Microsoft 365 phishing attacks impersonate US govt agencies (bleepingcomputer.com)
How DKIM records reduce email spoofing, phishing and spam (techtarget.com)
Security alert: new phishing campaign targets GitHub users | The GitHub Blog
American Airlines learned it was breached from phishing targets (bleepingcomputer.com)
Email-based threats: A pain point for organisations - Help Net Security
Other Social Engineering; Smishing, Vishing, etc
Malware
IT giants warn of ongoing Chromeloader malware campaigns - Security Affairs
Fake sites fool Zoom users into downloading deadly code • The Register
Malicious NPM package discovered in supply chain attack (techtarget.com)
How botnet attacks work and how to defend against them (bleepingcomputer.com)
Mobile
This dangerous Android spyware could affect millions of devices | TechRadar
Banking Users Faced With Rewards Phishing Scam - IT Security Guru
Malicious Apps With Millions of Downloads Found in Apple App Store, Google Play (darkreading.com)
Data Breaches/Leaks
Cyber Attack Steals Passenger Data From Portuguese Airline | SecurityWeek.Com
American Airlines discloses data breach after employee email compromise (bleepingcomputer.com)
Significant cyber attack hits Australian telco Optus • The Register
Organised Crime & Criminal Actors
London Police Arrested 17-Year-Old Hacker Suspected of Uber and GTA 6 Breaches (thehackernews.com)
Ukraine dismantles hacker gang that stole 30 million accounts (bleepingcomputer.com)
Cambodian authorities crack down on cyber slavery • The Register
Cryptocurrency/Cryptomining/Cryptojacking/NFTs/Blockchain
Cryptocurrency world's Wintermute loses $160m in cyber-heist • The Register
South Korean prosecutors ask Interpol to issue red notice for Do Kwon | Financial Times (ft.com)
"Fake crypto millionaire" charged with alleged $1.7M cryptomining scam (bitdefender.com)
Insider Risk and Insider Threats
Fraud, Scams & Financial Crime
Multi-million dollar credit card fraud operation uncovered (bleepingcomputer.com)
Microsoft Warns of Large-Scale Click Fraud Campaign Targeting Gamers (thehackernews.com)
Cyber crime cost American seniors $3 billion last year, a 62% jump (usatoday.com)
Insurance
Cyber Security Insurance Trends: Key Takeaways for MSPs - MSSP Alert
D&O insurance not yet a priority despite criminal trial of Uber’s former CISO | CSO Online
Supply Chain and Third Parties
Denial of Service DoS/DDoS
DDoS and bot attacks in 2022: Business sectors at risk and how to defend (bleepingcomputer.com)
Record DDoS Attack with 25.3 Billion Requests Abused HTTP/2 Multiplexing (thehackernews.com)
Imperva mitigated long-lasting, 25.3 billion request DDoS attack (bleepingcomputer.com)
Cloud/SaaS
Encryption
API
Open Source
Privacy, Surveillance and Mass Monitoring
Pressure mounts against Europol over data privacy • The Register
San Francisco cops can use private cameras for surveillance • The Register
Parental Controls and Child Safety
Regulations, Fines and Legislation
5 Data Privacy Laws That Could Affect Your Business (informationsecuritybuzz.com)
France and Germany fall foul of EU data retention rules • The Register
Spyware, Cyber Espionage & Cyber Warfare, including Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Russia Makes Veiled Threat to Destroy SpaceX's Starlink (pcmag.com)
Researchers Uncover New Metador APT Targeting Telcos, ISPs, and Universities (thehackernews.com)
Russian Sandworm hackers pose as Ukrainian telcos to drop malware (bleepingcomputer.com)
Anonymous claims hacked website of Russian Ministry of Defence - Security Affairs
Pro-Ukraine Hacktivists Claim to Have Hacked Notorious Russian Mercenary Group (vice.com)
European Spyware Investigators Criticize Israel and Poland | SecurityWeek.Com
Hackathon finds dozens of Ukrainian refugees trafficked online | Ars Technica
Researchers Uncover Mysterious 'Metador' Cyber-Espionage Group (darkreading.com)
This dangerous Android spyware could affect millions of devices | TechRadar
Nation State Actors
Nation State Actors – Russia
Inside Russia’s Vast Surveillance State: ‘They Are Watching’ - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Russian Cyberspies Targeting Ukraine Pose as Telecoms Providers | SecurityWeek.Com
Nation State Actors – China
Nation State Actors – Iran
FBI: Iranian hackers lurked in Albania’s govt network for 14 months (bleepingcomputer.com)
NATO's Team in Albania to Help on Iran-Alleged Cyber Attack | SecurityWeek.Com
Nation State Actors – Misc
Vulnerability Management
Vulnerabilities
Hackers Actively Exploiting New Sophos Firewall RCE Vulnerability (thehackernews.com)
CISA adds Zoho ManageEngine flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalogue - Security Affairs
AttachMe: a critical flaw affects Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) - Security Affairs
BIND Updates Patch High-Severity Vulnerabilities | SecurityWeek.Com
15-year-old Python flaw found in 'over 350,000' projects • The Register
CISA warns of critical ManageEngine RCE bug used in attacks (bleepingcomputer.com)
Critical Magento vulnerability targeted in new surge of attacks (bleepingcomputer.com)
Reports Published in the Last Week
Other News
Why Even Big Tech Companies Keep Getting Hacked—and What They Plan to Do About It - WSJ
20/20 visibility is paramount to network security - Help Net Security
Domain shadowing becoming more popular among cyber criminals (bleepingcomputer.com)
Multi-factor authentication fatigue attacks are on the rise: How to defend against them | CSO Online
What's behind the different names for cyber hacker groups (axios.com)
IT services group Wipro fires 300 employees moonlighting for competitors | TechCrunch
How can organisations benefit from full-stack observability? - Help Net Security
Firing Your Entire Cyber Security Team? Are You Sure? (thehackernews.com)
Cyber criminals launching more MFA bypass attacks (techtarget.com)
Microsoft (MSFT) Says Managers Shouldn’t Spy on Staff to Ensure They’re Working - Bloomberg
A third of enterprises globally don’t prioritize digital trust: ISACA | CSO Online
How Malware Hides in Images and What You Can Do About It (gizmodo.com)
International cooperation is key to fighting threat actors and cyber crime | CSO Online
Sector Specific
Industry specific threat intelligence reports are available.
Contact us to receive tailored reports specific to the industry/sector and geographies you operate in.
· Automotive
· Construction
· Critical National Infrastructure (CNI)
· Defence & Space
· Education & Academia
· Energy & Utilities
· Estate Agencies
· Financial Services
· FinTech
· Food & Agriculture
· Gaming & Gambling
· Government & Public Sector (including Law Enforcement)
· Health/Medical/Pharma
· Hotels & Hospitality
· Insurance
· Legal
· Manufacturing
· Maritime
· Oil, Gas & Mining
· OT, ICS, IIoT, SCADA & Cyber-Physical Systems
· Retail & eCommerce
· Small and Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs)
· Startups
· Telecoms
· Third Sector & Charities
· Transport & Aviation
· Web3
As usual, contact us to help assess where your risks lie and to ensure you are doing all you can do to keep you and your business secure.
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