Ransomware Payments and Sanctions - U.S. Treasury Advisory

On Oct. 1, the United States Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control OFAC issued an advisory concerning ransomware payments and sanctions regulations. The advisory warned that paying ransoms to sanctioned persons and entities risks violating the law. It also notes that OFAC may impos...

Rare Bootkit Malware Targets North Korea-Linked Diplomats

A firmware bootkit has been spotted in the wild, targeting diplomats and members of non-governmental organizations NGOs from Africa, Asia and Europe. It has turned out to be part of a newly uncovered framework called MosaicRegressor. According to researchers from Kaspersky, code artifacts in some...

CISA and MS-ISAC Release Ransomware Guide

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA and the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center MS-ISAC have released a joint Ransomware Guide that details practices that organizations should continuously engage in to help manage the risk posed by ransomware and other cyber...

Microsoft Exchange 2010 End of Support and Overall Patching Study

Today's topic is Exchange 2010, which reaches end of support EoS on Oct. 13, 2020, as well as a survey of other versions of Exchange and how well they are being kept up-to-date. During our work with Project Sonar, we consistently see the use of old and EoS software on the internet. This is...

Mac, Linux Users Now Targeted by FinSpy Variants

The FinSpy commercial spyware is back in recently observed campaigns against organizations and activists in Egypt. While the spyware previously targeted Windows, iOS and Android users, researchers have discovered these campaigns using new variants that target macOS and Linux users. FinSpy is a...

Industrial Cyberattacks Get Rarer but More Complex

Cyberattacks against the oil and gas industry inched up only slightly compared to the second half of 2019. Security experts say they are encouraged by the anemic growth, but at the same time are expressing concern that attacks are now becoming more potent, targeted and complex. According to new...

FinSpy Spyware for Mac and Linux OS Targets Egyptian Organisations

Amnesty International today exposed details of a new surveillance campaign that targeted Egyptian civil society organizations with previously undisclosed versions of FinSpy spyware designed to target Linux and macOS systems. Developed by a German company, FinSpy is extremely powerful spying...

Microsoft Security—detecting empires in the cloud

Microsoft consistently tracks the most advanced threat actors and evolving attack techniques. We use these findings to harden our products and platform and share them with the security community to help defenders everywhere better protect the planet. Recently, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence...

OldGremlin Ransomware Group Bedevils Russian Orgs

A new cybercriminal group called OldGremlin has been targeting Russian companies – including banks, industrial enterprises and medical firms – with ransomware attacks. OldGremlin relies on a bevy of tools, including custom backdoors called TinyPosh and TinyNode, to gain an initial foothold in the...

Charities and the advertising industry: data ecosystems and privacy risks

Data makes the world go round, more often than not via advertising and its tracking mechanisms. Whether you think making money from large volumes of PII to keep the web ticking over is a good thing, or a sleazy data-grab often encouraging terrible ad practices, it’s not going to go away anytime...

The informed voter’s guide to election cyberthreats

Singapore held its most recent general election on July 10 2020, and although they used the electoral system called first-past-the-post FPTP, a scheme favored by the US, UK, and most English-speaking countries, the road leading to Election Day was not without challenges and obstacles. While all...

Unprecedented Levels of Ransom DDoS Extortion Attacks

The FBI has released a flash warning that thousands of organizations around the world, and across multiple industries, have been threatened with DDoS attacks unless they pay a bitcoin ransom. This ransom DDoS, or RDoS, threat was covered by Akamai's Security Intelligence Response Team SIRT in a...

Russia’s Fancy Bear Hackers Are Hitting US Campaign Targets Again

Microsoft says the GRU hacking group has attacked hundreds of organizations over the past year, many of them tied to the upcoming election...

DoS and DDoS Attacks against Multiple Sectors

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA is aware of open-source reporting of targeted denial-of-service DoS and distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks against finance and business organizations worldwide. A DoS attack is accomplished by flooding the targeted host or network...

Akamai, CISA, and CIS Join Forces to Improve SLTT Cyber Defenses

Cybercriminals continue to target U.S. state, local, tribal, and territorial SLTT government organizations. In 2019, there were more than 100 ransomware attacks -- including an attack on Baltimore's IT systems that locked out thousands of computers and disrupted nearly every city service. This...

China-based APT Debuts Sepulcher Malware in Spear-Phishing Attacks

A China-based APT has been sending organizations spear-phishing emails that distribute a never-before-seen intelligence-collecting RAT dubbed Sepulcher. Researchers discovered the new malware being distributed over the past six months through two separate campaigns. The first, in March, targeted...

Pioneer Kitten APT Sells Corporate Network Access

An APT group known as Pioneer Kitten, linked to Iran, has been spotted selling corporate-network credentials on hacker forums. The credentials would let other cybercriminal groups and APTs perform cyberespionage and other nefarious cyber-activity. Pioneer Kitten is a hacker group that specializes...

API: The Unsung Hero of the DevOps Revolution

Watch this session to dive into the capabilities of APIs, as well as how organizations have used APIs to solve problems and add security to their value stream...

Medical Data Leaked on GitHub Due to Developer Errors

Developer error caused the leak of 150,000 to 200,000 patient health records stored in productivity apps from Microsoft and Google that were recently found on GitHub. Dutch researcher Jelle Ursem discovered nine separate files of highly sensitive personal health information PHI from apps such as...

The impact of COVID-19 on healthcare cybersecurity

As if stress levels in the healthcare industry weren’t high enough due to the COVID-19 pandemic, risks to its already fragile cybersecurity infrastructure are at an all-time high. From increased cyberattacks to exacerbated vulnerabilities to costly human errors, if healthcare cybersecurity wasnt...