Framing the Problem: Cyber Threats and Elections

This year, Canada, multiple European nations, and others will host high profile elections. The topic of cyber-enabled threats disrupting and targeting elections has become an increasing area of awareness for governments and citizens globally. To develop solutions and security programs to counter...

Top UK Official Derides Huawei Claiming it has ‘Bad Security’

THE HAGUE, Netherlands – A top official at the National Cyber Security Centre in the UK set his sights on Huawei, the telecom equipment giant, in an opening keynote session at the GSMA’s Mobile360 Security for 5G conference on Tuesday. Ian Levy, technical director at the agency, took the stage fo...

Chinese Spy Group Mixes Up Its Malware Arsenal with Brand-New Loaders

The Chinese-language cyber-espionage group known as APT10 has apparently added to its malware bag of tricks, with two never-before-seen malware loader variants used in April campaigns against government and private organizations in Southeast Asia. Also, the campaigns featured modified versions of...

U.S. Charges WikiLeaks' Julian Assange With Violating Espionage Act

The United States Justice Department has unveiled charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with 17 new counts on the alleged violation of the Espionage Act by publishing classified information through WikiLeaks website. If convicted for all counts, Assange could face a maximum sentence of...

U.S. Charges WikiLeaks' Julian Assange With Violating Espionage Act

The United States Justice Department has unveiled charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with 17 new counts on the alleged violation of the Espionage Act by publishing classified information through WikiLeaks website. If convicted for all counts, Assange could face a maximum sentence of...

The Latest Julian Assange Indictment Is an Assault on Press Freedom

By invoking the Espionage Act against Julian Assange, the Justice Department will effectively put national security journalism on trial...

IT threat evolution Q1 2019

Targeted attacks and malware campaigns Go Zebrocy Zebrocy was first observed being used as a Sofacy backdoor in 2015. However, the collection of cases where this tool has been used mean that we consider it a subset of activity in its own right. On the basis of this threat actor's past behaviour, ...

ScarCruft APT Adds Bluetooth Harvester to its Malware Bag of Tricks

The ScarCruft Korean-speaking APT is changing up its espionage tactics to include an unusual piece of malware devoted to harvesting Bluetooth information – while also showing some overlap with the DarkHotel APT. An analysis of ScarCruft’s binary infection procedure by Kaspersky Lab shows that in ...

Excerpts from “5 Questions for Eric O’Neil—the FBI “ghost” who brought down a Russian Mole”

Eric O’Neill serves as Carbon Black’s national security strategist where he is a thought leader on a wide range of issues including counterterrorism and national security matters. Prior to this, he was as an operative for the FBI, where he conducted national security field operations against...

Researchers in the Dark on Powerful LightNeuron Malware for Years

LightNeuron, a backdoor specifically designed to target Microsoft Exchange mail servers, has flown under the radar since at least 2014, despite being the malware linchpin at the center of several targeted campaigns. A fresh analysis of the recently uncovered code shows that it’s the first publicl...

The 2019 DBIR is out

Once again, we are happy to support a large, voluntary, collaborative effort like the 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report. While our data contribution is completely anonymous, it is based in some of the 2018 data set that our private report customers receive from our efforts to protect all of...

“There Are No Hackers, There Are Only Spies”

In December 2015, I opened a letter from the Office of Personnel Management. The OPM oversees healthcare and insurance programs, administers retirement and benefit services, and assists federal agencies in hiring new employees and providing federal investigative services for background checks. Th...

Verizon Data Breach Report: Espionage, C-Suite and Cloud Attacks on the Rise

Corporate espionage is on the rise as a motivation for cyberattacks, with a full quarter of all network compromises associated with reconnaissance and data exfiltration in the last 12 months. However, financially motivated attacks aren’t going anywhere; social-engineering attacks aimed at stealin...

New DNS Hijacking Attacks

DNS hijacking isn't new, but this seems to be an attack of unprecedented scale: Researchers at Cisco's Talos security division on Wednesday revealed that a hacker group it's calling Sea Turtle carried out a broad campaign of espionage via DNS hijacking, hitting 40 different organizations. In the...

State-Sponsored DNS Hijacking Infiltrates 40 Firms Globally

A newly-discovered state-sponsored campaign is targeting national security organizations across the Middle East and North Africa MENA – and elsewhere – with domain name system DNS hijacking attacks, used to scoop up credentials. The campaign, dubbed “Sea Turtle” by the Cisco Talos researchers who...

RatVermin Spyware Targets Ukraine Gov Agencies

Researchers have uncovered an ongoing spear-phishing campaign, targeting the Ukraine government and military with emails aiming to distribute the RatVermin malware, which carries out various info-gathering activities. Researchers said that an infrastructure analysis of the attack indicates that t...

China Spying on Undersea Internet Cables

Supply chain security is an insurmountably hard problem. The recent focus is on Chinese 5G equipment, but the problem is much broader. This opinion piece looks at undersea communications cables: But now the Chinese conglomerate Huawei Technologies, the leading firm working to deliver 5G telephony...

North Korea's Hidden Cobra Strikes U.S. Targets with HOPLIGHT

A never-before-seen spyware variant called HOPLIGHT is targeting U.S. companies and government agencies in active attacks, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In an advisory this week, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team US-CERT said that there are nine differen...

SAS 2019: Gaza Cybergang Blends Sophistication Levels in Highly Effective Spy Effort

SINGAPORE — Around 240 high-profile victims in 39 countries worldwide have become victims of an APT cyber-espionage attack, led by an organization dubbed the Gaza Cybergang that comprises several groups of varying sophistication. The victims, who were all targeted last year, include political,...

'Exodus' Surveillance Malware Found Targeting Apple iOS Users

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an iOS version of the powerful mobile phone surveillance app that was initially targeting Android devices through apps on the official Google Play Store. Dubbed Exodus, as the malware is called, the iOS version of the spyware was discovered by security...