Australian Spycatchers Snatch Pair of Married Russian Operatives
A 40-year-old Australian Defence Force (ADF) army private and her 62-year-old husband have been arrested and charged with spying for Russia, as part of a sting operation named BURGAZADA. The pair, Kira and Igor Korolev, have lived in Australia for more than a decade and were arrested at home in Brisbane on July 11. Each…
Microsoft: ‘Moonstone Sleet’ APT Melds Espionage, Financial Goals
Researchers at Microsoft have identified a North Korean threat group carrying out espionage and financial cyberattacks concurrently, using a grab bag of different attack techniques against aerospace, education, and software organizations and developers. In the beginning, Microsoft explained in a blog post, Moonstone Sleet heavily overlapped with the known DPRK advanced persistent threat (APT) Diamond…
Chinese Hackers Penetrated Unclassified Dutch Network
Chinese espionage hackers penetrated Dutch military systems in early 2023, using a zero-day exploit in a Fortinet virtual private network to obtain access, Netherlands intelligence agencies disclosed Tuesday. The agencies said the effects had been limited to a segmented network that had fewer than 50 users working on unclassified research and development with two-third party…
Chinese Hackers Target Routers in IP Theft Campaign
A Chinese hacking group linked to state authorities in Beijing has upgraded its espionage capabilities to target companies with headquarters in the United States and East Asia, warned an alert from Japanese and American cyber agencies. The latest campaign from BlackTech has targeted networks of regional subsidiaries across government, industrial, technology and defense industrial base…
Chinese Hackers Anticipated Barracuda ESG Patch
Chinese espionage hackers behind an eight-month campaign to hack Barracuda email security appliances intensified their focus on high-priority targets around the time the company moved to fix the zero-day flaw behind the campaign. Within roughly a week of Barracuda’s late-May public disclosures of the zero-day flaw affording Chinese hackers access to its ESG line of…
Dutch Critical OT Systems Vulnerable to Hacks
Critical services in the Netherlands could be a potential target of ransomware and hacktivist attackers with ties to Russia as a means to sow large-scale disruptions in the country, according to a Dutch National Cyber Security Centre warning this week. Although the Russian invasion of Ukraine did not immediately result in a high-level of attacks…
Threat group targets over 1,000 companies with screenshotting and infostealing malware
Researchers warn that a new threat actor has been targeting over a thousand organizations since October with the goal of deploying credential-stealing malware. The attack chain also involves reconnaissance components including a Trojan that takes screenshots of the desktops of infected computers. Tracked as TA866 by researchers from security firm Proofpoint, the group’s tooling seems…
Assange Wins First Stage in Effort to Appeal US Extradition
The High Court in London gave Assange permission to appeal the case to the U.K. Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court must agree to accept the case before it can move forward. “Make no mistake, we won today in court,” Assange’s fiancee, Stella Moris, said outside the courthouse, noting that he remains in custody at…
Cyber Insights 2022: Supply Chain
Mike Sentonas, CTO at CrowdStrike, comments, “Frankly put, supply chains are vulnerable, and adversaries are actively researching ways to take advantage of this. We haven’t nearly seen the end of these attacks, and the implications for each one are significant for both the victims and the victims’ customers and partners up and down the chain.”…
17 Malware Frameworks Target Air-Gapped Systems for Espionage
The list was created over the course of 15 years, but the last four of the frameworks emerged last year, proof of an increased interest by threat actors to target isolated systems. Only malware components working together to create an offline, covert communication channel between air-gapped networks and a threat actor were taken into consideration…
