China Hacked Japan’s Military Networks

The NSA discovered the intrusion in 2020--we dont know how--and alerted the Japanese. The Washington Post has the story: The hackers had deep, persistent access and appeared to be after anything they could get their hands on--plans, capabilities, assessments of military shortcomings, according to...

VirusTotal Data Leak Exposes Some Registered Customers' Details

Data associated with a subset of registered customers of VirusTotal, including their names and email addresses, were exposed after an employee inadvertently uploaded the information to the malware scanning platform. The security incident, which comprises a database of 5,600 names in a 313KB file,...

The Tragic Fallout From a School District’s Ransomware Breach

Plus: Cyber Command’s disruption of Iranian election hacking, an exposé on child sex trafficking on Meta’s platforms, and more...

MERCURY and DEV-1084: Destructive attack on hybrid environment

April 2023 update – Microsoft Threat Intelligence has shifted to a new threat actor naming taxonomy aligned around the theme of weather. MERCURY is now tracked as Mango Sandstorm and DEV-1084 is now tracked as Storm-1084. To learn more about the new taxonomy represents the origin, unique traits,...

Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Affiliated Cyber Actors Exploiting Vulnerabilities for Data Extortion and Disk Encryption for Ransom Operations

Summary Actions to take today to protect against ransom operations: • Keep systems and software updated and prioritize remediating known exploited vulnerabilities. • Enforce MFA. • Make offline backups of your data. This joint Cybersecurity Advisory CSA is the result of an analytic effort among t...

Hackers Target Ukrainian Software Company Using GoMet Backdoor

A large software development company whose software is used by different state entities in Ukraine was at the receiving end of an "uncommon" piece of malware, new research has found. The malware, first observed on the morning of May 19, 2022, is a custom variant of the open source backdoor known ...

CNMF Discloses Malware in Ukraine

U.S. Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force CNMF, in close coordination with the Security Service of Ukraine, has released a list of indicators of compromise IOCs of malware seen in Ukraine. According to CNMF, “Ukrainian partners are actively sharing malicious activity they find with us to...

Microsoft Blocks Iran-linked Lebanese Hackers Targeting Israeli Companies

Microsoft on Thursday said it took steps to disable malicious activity stemming from abuse of OneDrive by a previously undocumented threat actor it tracks under the chemical element-themed moniker Polonium. In addition to removing the offending accounts created by the Lebanon-based activity group...

CNMF Identifies and Discloses Malware used by Iranian APT MuddyWater

U.S. Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force CNMF has identified multiple open-source tools used by an Iranian advanced persistent threat APT group known as MuddyWater. According to CNMF, “MuddyWater has been seen using a variety of techniques to maintain access to victim networks. These...

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...

Cyber Command Publicly Joins Fight Against Ransomware Groups

Cybercriminals who launch attacks on critical U.S. companies are going to be targeted by the branch of the military known as Cyber Command, and everyone has been put on notice. Gen. Paul Nakasone, who heads up Cyber Command, told the New York Times this weekend that his team isn’t just going afte...

Latest Atlassian Confluence Flaw Exploited to Breach Jenkins Project Server

The maintainers of Jenkins—a popular open-source automation server software—have disclosed a security breach after unidentified threat actors gained access to one of their servers by exploiting a recently disclosed vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence service to install a cryptocurrency miner. T...

Active Exploitation of Confluence Server & Confluence Data Center: CVE-2021-26084

This attack is ongoing. See the Updates section at the end of this post for new information as it comes to light. On August 25, 2021, Atlassian published details on CVE-2021-26084, a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center. The vulnerability...

New CISA Director Confirmed, W.H. Gains Cyber-Director

The U.S. has made a key move to shore up its cybersecurity strategy, with the confirmation of Jen Easterly as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA on Monday. Easterly, a former official at the National Security Agency from 2011 to 2013 and two-time Bronze Star...

Afternoon Cyber Tea: Microsoft’s cybersecurity response to COVID-19

On February 25, 2020, Microsoft Chief Information Security Officer CISO Bret Arsenault was attending the RSA Conference in San Francisco when the city declared a state of emergency because of COVID-19. Shortly after flying back to Seattle, Bret learned of the first death from the coronavirus in...

CISA and CNMF Analysis of SolarWinds-related Malware

CISA and the Department of Defense DoD Cyber National Mission Force CNMF have analyzed additional SolarWinds-related malware variants—referred to as SUNSHUTTLE and SOLARFLARE. One of the analyzed files was identified as a China Chopper webshell server-side component that was observed on a network...

The Opportunities—and Obstacles—for Women at NSA and Cyber Command

WIRED spoke with three women working in cybersecurity in the US intelligence community about the progress of recent years and the work that remains...

US Cyber Command Valentine’s Day Cryptography Puzzles

The US Cyber Command has released a series of ten Valentines Day "Cryptography Challenge Puzzles." Slashdot thread. Reddit thread. And heres the archived link, in case Cyber Command takes the page down...

CISA and CNMF Identify a New Malware Variant: Zebrocy

Content: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA and the Department of Defense DOD Cyber National Mission Force CNMF have identified a malware variant—referred to as Zebrocy—used by a sophisticated cyber actor. In addition, U.S. Cyber Command has released the malware sample to t...

CISA, FBI, and CNMF Identify a New Malware Variant: ComRAT

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI, and the Department of Defense Cyber National Mission Force CNMF have identified a malware variant—referred to as ComRAT—used by the Russian-sponsored advanced persistent threat APT actor Turla. In...