Austria Probes Claim Spyware Targeted Law Firms, Banks
Microsoft’s security team earlier this week said it found that a malware called Subzero — developed by Vienna-based company DSIRF — was deployed in 2021 and 2022. “Observed victims to date include law firms, banks and strategic consultancies in countries such as Austria, the United Kingdom and Panama,” it wrote in a blog entry on…
Apple Debuts Spyware Protection for State-Sponsored Cyberattacks
Apple today announced a new feature called Lockdown Mode that automatically locks down any system functionality that could be hijacked by even the most sophisticated, state-sponsored mercenary spyware to compromise a user device. While Apple acknowledged in its statement announcing the initiative that the number of users who might need Lockdown Mode is small, protecting…
Spanish Judge to Seek Testimony From NSO on Pegasus Spyware
The court said that José Luis Calama has decided to lead a judicial commission that will travel to Israel to “take testimony from the CEO of the company that commercializes the Pegasus program.” Shalev Hulio is the CEO of the Tel Aviv-based NSO Group. The court gave no date for the judge’s trip. When asked…
Codex Exposed: Helping Hackers in Training?
In June 2020, OpenAI released version 3 of its Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-3), a natural language transformer that took the tech world by storm with its uncanny ability to generate text seemingly written by humans. But GPT-3 was also trained on computer code, and recently OpenAI released a specialized version of its engine, named Codex,…
Thousands of Industrial Systems Targeted With New ‘PseudoManuscrypt’ Spyware
The attacks targeted 35,000 devices in 195 countries between January and November 2021, including devices housed by high-profile organizations. Roughly seven percent of the targets were ICS, with the engineering and building automation sectors being most impacted. Attacks were also aimed at military industrial enterprises and research laboratories. In many cases, the attackers targeted engineering…
Amnesty Links Indian Cybersecurity Firm to Spyware Attack on African Activist
In late 2019 and early 2020, ahead of the presidential elections in Togo, the Donot Team hacking group attempted to spy on a prominent Togolese human rights defender, but only managed to raise the victim’s suspicion. Active since at least 2012 and also tracked as APT-C-35, and SectorE02, Donot Team is mainly known for its…
A look at the top threats inside malicious emails
Web-phishing targeting various online services almost doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic: it accounted for 46 percent of the total number of fake web pages, Group-IB reveals. Ransomware, the headliner of the previous half-year, walked off stage: only 1 percent of emails analyzed contained this kind of malware. Every third email, meanwhile, contained spyware, which is…
Uganda, Zambia Deny Huawei Helped Spy on Political Opponents
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported this week that Huawei technicians helped the two African governments intercept communications and social media activity of their opponents, while also tracking their movements. The article also reported that Huawei operated a video and cyber surveillance system in Algeria, which the company denied. Algeria’s foreign ministry did not respond…
