Using Foreign Nationals to Bypass US Surveillance Restrictions

Remember when the US and Australian police surreptitiously owned and operated the encrypted cell phone app ANOM? They arrested 800 people in 2021 based on that operation. New documents received by Motherboard show that over 100 of those phones were shipped to users in the US, far more than...

FIN7 Mails Malicious USB Sticks to Drop Ransomware

Ransomware gangs are mailing malicious USB drives, posing as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services HHS and/or Amazon to target the transportation, insurance and defense industries for ransomware infection, the FBI warned on Friday. In a security alert sent to organizations, the FBI sai...

CISA, FBI, and NSA Release Cybersecurity Advisory on Russian Cyber Threats to U.S. Critical Infrastructure

CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI, and the National Security Agency NSA have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory CSA that provides an overview of Russian state-sponsored cyber operations, including commonly observed tactics, techniques, and procedures. The CSA also provides...

FBI warns of hackers mailing malicious USB drives to spread ransomware

By Deeba Ahmed FBI's warning highlights the fact that one should never insert an unknown USB flash drive in their PCs. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: FBI warns of hackers mailing malicious USB drives to spread ransomware...

McMenamins Data Breach Affects 12 Years of Employee Info

A ransomware attack on the McMenamins dining and hospitality empire in the Pacific Northwest came along with a data breach covering 12 years of employee data, the organization has confirmed. The Dec. 12 incident – which some have attributed to the Conti gang – forced McMenamins to shut down vario...

A week in security (Dec 20 – 26)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: When a deepfake “empire” continues to grow Everything you always wanted to know about NFTs but were too afraid to ask: Lock and Code S02E24 Police forces pipe 225 million pwned passwords into ‘Have I Been Pwned?’ Logistics giant warns of scams following ransomware...

FBI traces and grabs back $150 million theft that was turned into bitcoins

On December 1, 2021, the Tokyo police arrested an employee of Sony Life Insurance on suspicion of fraudulently obtaining 17 billion yen through an illegal money transfer from an overseas unit. On the same day 3,879 bitcoins, worth about $150 million, were seized by law enforcement, and on the...

Stolen Bitcoins Returned

The US has returned $154 million in bitcoins stolen by a Sony employee. However, on December 1, following an investigation in collaboration with Japanese law enforcement authorities, the FBI seized the 3879.16242937 BTC in Ishiis wallet after obtaining the private key, which made it possible to...

Half-Billion Compromised Credentials Lurking on Open Cloud Server

According to the National Crime Agency’s National Cyber Crime Unit in the U.K., nearly 586 million sets of credentials had been collected in a compromised cloud storage facility, free for the taking by any cybercrime yahoo who happened to stop by. The credentials were a mixed bag in terms of...

FBI: Another Zoho ManageEngine Zero-Day Under Active Attack

Another Zoho ManageEngine zero-day vulnerability is under active attack from an APT group, this time looking to override legitimate functions of servers running ManageEngine Desktop Central and elevate privileges — with an ultimate goal of dropping malware onto organizations’ networks, the FBI ha...

Conti Gang Suspected of Ransomware Attack on McMenamins

A family-run chain of hotels and restaurants this week has been grappling with the aftermath of a ransomware attack that occurred last weekend that may have exposed employees’ sensitive personal data, according to multiple reports. The incident – which some have attributed to the Conti gang –...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, December 2021 Edition

Microsoft, Adobe, and Google all issued security updates to their products today. The Microsoft patches include six previously disclosed security flaws, and one that is already being actively exploited. But this months Patch Tuesday is overshadowed by the "Log4Shell" 0-day exploit in a popular Ja...

How to Buy Precious Patching Time as Log4j Exploits Fly

Sure, Apache got a patch out fast when the Log4j logging library vulnerability – aka Javageddon or “up there with Shellshock” – exploded last week. But emergency patches take days best-case scenario or weeks to install: plenty of time for attackers to do their worst. Which they lickety-split did,...

Ransomware Affiliate Arrested in Romania; 51 Stolen Data Brokers Arrested in Ukraine

Europol, the European Union's premier law enforcement agency, has announced the arrest of a third Romanian national for his role as a ransomware affiliate suspected of hacking high-profile organizations and companies and stealing large volumes of sensitive data. The 41-year-old unnamed individual...

Canadian Citizen Charged for Ransomware Attacks in Alaska

By Deeba Ahmed The accused became a suspect when the FBI contacted Canadian intelligence after observing a surge in ransomware attacks in Alaska in 2018. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Canadian Citizen Charged for Ransomware Attacks in Alaska...

Law Enforcement Access to Chat Data and Metadata

A January 2021 FBI document outlines what types of data and metadata can be lawfully obtained by the FBI from messaging apps. Rolling Stone broke the story and its been written about elsewhere. I dont see a lot of surprises in the document. Lots of apps leak all sorts of metadata: iMessage and...

RANSOMWARE: Ranzy Locker

On 25 October 2021, the FBI released a report documenting their findings about a ransomware variant known as Ranzy Locker. While Ranzy Locker has not been used as prolifically as Conti or Darkside, it does leverage some of the same old ransomware tricks to attack its victims. In conjunction with...

Canada Charges Its “Most Prolific Cybercriminal”

A 31-year-old Canadian man has been arrested and charged with fraud in connection with numerous ransomware attacks against businesses, government agencies and private citizens throughout Canada and the United States. Canadian authorities describe him as "the most prolific cybercriminal weve...

‘Cuba’ Ransomware Gang Hauls in $44M in Payouts

The “Cuba” ransomware gang has settled into a groove, compromising at least 49 entities in five critical sectors in the U.S. as of November, the FBI has warned. In a flash alert, the Feds attributed a rash of attacks on U.S. entities in the financial, government, healthcare, manufacturing and...

APT Actors Exploiting CVE-2021-44077 in Zoho ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus

Summary This joint Cybersecurity Advisory uses the MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge ATT &CK® framework, Version 9. See the ATT&CK for Enterprise framework for referenced threat actor techniques and for mitigations. This joint advisory is the result of analytic efforts...