NSA Watchdog Will Review Tucker Carlson Spy Claims

The National Security Agency’s Inspector General Robert Storch has announced a review of whether the agency illegally conducted cyber-espionage and collected the electronic communications of Fox News opinion-show host Tucker Carlson, who has accused the NSA of trying to capture embarrassing...

UNC215: Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel

This blog post details the post-compromise tradecraft and operational tactics, techniques, and procedures TTPs of a Chinese espionage group we track as UNC215. While UNC215’s targets are located throughout the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and North America, this report focuses on intrusion activity...

Experts Believe Chinese Hackers Are Behind Several Attacks Targeting Israel

A Chinese cyber espionage group has been linked to a string of intrusion activities targeting Israeli government institutions, IT providers, and telecommunications companies at least since 2019, with the hackers masquerading themselves as Iranian actors to mislead forensic analysis. FireEye's...

Russian Federal Agencies Were Attacked With Chinese Webdav-O Virus

An amalgam of multiple state-sponsored threat groups from China may have been behind a string of targeted attacks against Russian federal executive authorities in 2020. The latest research, published by Singapore-headquartered company Group-IB, delves into a piece of computer virus called...

New Chinese Spyware Being Used in Widespread Cyber Espionage Attacks

A threat actor presumed to be of Chinese origin has been linked to a series of 10 attacks targeting Mongolia, Russia, Belarus, Canada, and the U.S. from January to July 2021 that involve the deployment of a remote access trojan RAT on infected systems, according to new research. The intrusions ha...

Chinese Hackers Target Major Southeast Asian Telecom Companies

Three distinct clusters of malicious activities operating on behalf of Chinese state interests have staged a series of attacks to target networks belonging to at least five major telecommunications companies located in Southeast Asian countries since 2017. "The goal of the attackers behind these...

Experts Uncover Several C&C Servers Linked to WellMess Malware

Cybersecurity researchers on Friday unmasked new command-and-control C2 infrastructure belonging to the Russian threat actor tracked as APT29, aka Cozy Bear, that has been spotted actively serving WellMess malware as part of an ongoing attack campaign. More than 30 C2 servers operated by the...

Hackers Posed as Aerobics Instructors for Years to Target Aerospace Employees

An Iranian cyberespionage group masqueraded as an aerobics instructor on Facebook in an attempt to infect the machine of an employee of an aerospace defense contractor with malware as part of a years-long social engineering and targeted malware campaign. Enterprise security firm Proofpoint...

Indictments, Attribution Unlikely to Deter Chinese Hacking

The federal government is fighting back against what it says are China-based cyberattacks against U.S. universities and companies with indictments and a “naming-and-shaming” approach — but researchers aren’t convinced the efforts will come to much in terms of deterring future activity. On Monday,...

US, EU, UK, NATO blame china for “reckless” Exchange attacks

Do you remember back when the latest urgent update was a vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange? How is that only four months ago? The trigger for the urgent advice in March was the fact that Microsoft detected multiple zero-day exploits being used to attack on-premises versions of Microsoft Exchang...

U.S. Government Releases Indictment and Several Advisories Detailing Chinese Cyber Threat Activity

CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI, and the National Security Agency NSA have observed increasingly sophisticated Chinese state-sponsored activity targeting U.S. political, economic, military, educational, and critical infrastructure personnel and organizations. In response: The White...

Facebook Suspends Accounts Used by Iranian Hackers to Target US Military Personnel

Facebook on Thursday disclosed it dismantled a "sophisticated" online cyber espionage campaign conducted by Iranian hackers targeting about 200 military personnel and companies in the defense and aerospace sectors in the U.S., U.K., and Europe using fake online personas on its platform. The socia...

Trickbot Malware Rebounds with Virtual-Desktop Espionage Module

The Trickbot trojan is in resurgence mode, with its operators filling out infrastructure globally and releasing an updated version of its “vncDll” module, used for monitoring and intelligence gathering, researchers said. According to an analysis this week from Bitdefender, there has been “a...

‘Charming Kitten’ APT Siphons Intel From Mid-East Scholars

An Iran-linked advanced persistent threat APT group has taken a scholarly bent with its latest phishing campaign, which involves lengthy chats with professors, think tank higher-ups and journalists focused on Middle Eastern affairs. The threat actor is Charming Kitten – aka a number of names,...

Oil & Gas Targeted in Year-Long Espionage Campaign

A sophisticated campaign targeting large international companies in the oil and gas sector has been underway for more than a year, researchers said, spreading common remote access trojans RATs for cyber-espionage purposes. According to Intezer analysis, spear-phishing emails with malicious...

Experts Uncover Malware Attacks Targeting Corporate Networks in Latin America

Cybersecurity researchers on Thursday took the wraps off a new, ongoing espionage campaign targeting corporate networks in Spanish-speaking countries, specifically Venezuela, to spy on its victims. Dubbed "Bandidos" by ESET owing to the use of an upgraded variant of Bandook malware, the primary...

SideCopy Hackers Target Indian Government Officials With New Malware

A cyber-espionage group has been observed increasingly targeting Indian government personnel as part of a broad campaign to infect victims with as many as four new custom remote access trojans RATs, signaling a "boost in their development operations." Attributed to a group tracked as SideCopy, th...

Ongoing Spearphishing Campaign Targets Afghan Gov’t

Chinese-speaking cyberespionage actors have targeted the Afghan government, using Dropbox for command-and-control C2 communications and going so far as to impersonate the Office of the President to infiltrate the Afghan National Security Council NSC, researchers have found. According to a report...

IndigoZebra APT Hacking Campaign Targets the Afghan Government

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of ongoing attacks coordinated by a suspected Chinese-speaking threat actor targeting the Afghanistan government as part of an espionage campaign that may have had its provenance as far back as 2014. Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point Research attributed...

Atomic research institute breached via VPN vulnerability

Remember when we told you to patch your VPNs already? I hate to say "I told you so", but I informed you thusly. According to South Korean officials a North Korean cyber-espionage group managed to infiltrate the network of South Koreas state-run nuclear research institute last month. The crime: ti...