Warnings Mount in Congress Over Expanded US Wiretap Powers

Experts tell US lawmakers that a crucial spy program’s safeguards are failing, allowing intel agencies deeper, unconstrained access to Americans’ data...

AndroxGh0st Malware Targets Laravel Apps to Steal Cloud Credentials

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a tool referred to as AndroxGh0st that's used to target Laravel applications and steal sensitive data. "It works by scanning and taking out important information from .env files, revealing login details linked to AWS and Twilio," Juniper Threat Labs...

South Korean Citizen Detained in Russia on Cyber Espionage Charges

Russia has detained a South Korean national for the first time on cyber espionage charges and transferred from Vladivostok to Moscow for further investigation. The development was first reported by Russian news agency TASS. "During the investigation of an espionage case, a South Korean citizen Ba...

Cybersecurity Agencies Warn Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Users of APT28's MooBot Threat

In a new joint advisory, cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from the U.S. and other countries are urging users of Ubiquiti EdgeRouter to take protective measures, weeks after a botnet comprising infected routers was felled by law enforcement as part of an operation codenamed Dying Ember. The...

How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

Meet the guy who taught US intelligence agencies how to make the most of the ad tech ecosystem, "the largest information-gathering enterprise ever conceived by man."...

NSA Admits Secretly Buying Your Internet Browsing Data without Warrants

The U.S. National Security Agency NSA has admitted to buying internet browsing records from data brokers to identify the websites and apps Americans use that would otherwise require a court order, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden said last week. "The U.S. government should not be funding and legitimizing a...

Backdoor in TETRA Police Radios

Seems that there is a deliberate backdoor in the twenty-year-old TErrestrial Trunked RAdio TETRA standard used by police forces around the world. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute ETSI, an organization that standardizes technologies across the industry, first created TETRA in...

Microsoft reports two Iranian hacking groups exploiting PaperCut flaw

By Deeba Ahmed The two groups exploiting the vulnerability are Mango Sandstorm and Mint Sandstorm. Both are linked to the Iranian government and intelligence agencies. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Microsoft reports two Iranian hacking groups exploiting PaperCut flaw...

U.S. Agencies Warn About Chinese Hackers Targeting Telecoms and Network Service Providers

U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies have warned about China-based state-sponsored cyber actors leveraging network vulnerabilities to exploit public and private sector organizations since at least 2020. The widespread intrusion campaigns aim to exploit publicly identified security flaws i...

Top 30 Critical Security Vulnerabilities Most Exploited by Hackers

Intelligence agencies in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. issued a joint advisory on Wednesday detailing the most exploited vulnerabilities in 2020 and 2021, once again demonstrating how threat actors are able to swiftly weaponize publicly disclosed flaws to their advantage. "Cyber actors contin...

Intentional Flaw in GPRS Encryption Algorithm GEA-1

General Packet Radio Service GPRS is a mobile data standard that was widely used in the early 2000s. The first encryption algorithm for that standard was GEA-1, a stream cipher built on three linear-feedback shift registers and a non-linear combining function. Although the algorithm has a 64-bit...

The Biggest Security Threats to the US Are the Hardest to Define

In a Senate briefing, the heads of the major intelligence agencies warned the public about dangers that offer no easy solutions...

How China Uses Stolen US Personnel Data

Interesting analysis of Chinas efforts to identify US spies: By about 2010, two former CIA officials recalled, the Chinese security services had instituted a sophisticated travel intelligence program, developing databases that tracked flights and passenger lists for espionage purposes. "We looked...

High-Stakes Security Setups Are Making Remote Work Impossible

Staffers at power grids, intelligence agencies, and more often don’t have the option to work from home, even in light of Covid-19...

Trump Still Doesn't Believe Russia Hacked the 2016 Election

Trump has publicly played down Russia’s role in the 2016 election. But even privately, he trusts conspiracy theories more than US intelligence agencies...

Security Vulnerabilities in Cell Phone Systems

Good essay on the inherent vulnerabilities in the cell phone standards and the market barriers to fixing them. So far, industry and policymakers have largely dragged their feet when it comes to blocking cell-site simulators and SS7 attacks. Senator Ron Wyden, one of the few lawmakers vocal about...

China's Hacking of the Border Gateway Protocol

This is a long -- and somewhat technical -- paper by Chris C. Demchak and Yuval Shavitt about China's repeated hacking of the Internet Border Gateway Protocol BGP: "China's Maxim ­ Leave No Access Point Unexploited: The Hidden Story of China Telecom's BGP Hijacking." BGP hacking is how large...

More on the Five Eyes Statement on Encryption and Backdoors

Earlier this month, I wrote about a statement by the Five Eyes countries about encryption and back doors. Short summary: they like them. One of the weird things about the statement is that it was clearly written from a law-enforcement perspective, though we normally think of the Five Eyes as a...

House Votes to Reauthorize Controversial Spy Provision, Section 702

The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Thursday to renew the National Security Agency’s spy powers to collect internet communications under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. The vote 256-to-164 in favor of the legislation ends a yearlong debate over...

Kaspersky Opens Antivirus Source Code for Independent Review to Rebuild Trust

Kaspersky Lab — We have nothing to hide! Russia-based Antivirus firm hits back with what it calls a "comprehensive transparency initiative," to allow independent third-party review of its source code and internal processes to win back the trust of customers and infosec community. Kaspersky launch...