CyberWire Daily

More notes on the RCMP espionage scandal. The CSE’s preliminary assessment sounds serious indeed, and Canadian intelligence services are trying to identify and contain the damage Cameron Ortis is alleged to have done. And the other Four Eyes are doing so as well. Australia considered that a hacking incident early this spring may have been a Chinese effort to compromise election systems. ISIS is ba...

Spy versus spy, in America, Canada, and Australia, with special guest stars from the Russian and Chinese services. The US Treasury Department issues more sanctions against North Korea’s  Reconnaissance General Bureau, better known as the Lazarus Group or Hidden Cobra. Russian election influence goes local (and domestic). Password manager security problems. And why does your flashlight want to know...

A team of researchers have published a report titled, "KNOB Attack. Key Negotiation of Bluetooth Attack: Breaking Bluetooth Security." The report outlines vulnerabilities in the Bluetooth standard, along with mitigations to prevent them.  Daniele Antonioli is from Singapore University of Technology and Design, and is one of the researchers studying KNOB. He joins us to share their findings. The re...

The Ukrainian electrical grid hack seems, on further review, to have been designed to do far more damage than it actually accomplished. InnfiRAT is scouting for access to cryptocurrency wallets. A sophisticated threat actor is using Simjacker for surveillance on phones in the Middle East. The SINET 16 have been announced. A penetration test goes bad due to a misunderstanding of scope, and Baltimor...

DC StingRays alleged to be Israeli devices. North Korea is slipping malware past defenses by putting it into old, obscure file formats. Ryuk ransomware gets some spyware functionality. Google has purged Joker-infested apps from the Play store. The US Defense Department explains its “multifaceted” approach to cyber deterrence. The FBI warns that business email compromise is on the upswing, and offe...

Cobalt Dickens is back, and phishing in universities’ ponds. UNICEF scores a security own-goal. Patch Tuesday notes. A look at US election security offers bad news, but with some hope for improvement. The US extends its state of national emergency with respect to foreign meddling in elections. And an international police sweep draws in 281 alleged BEC scammers. Ben Yelin from UMD CHHS on the priva...

John Bolton is out as US National Security Advisor. A new backdoor is attributed to Stealth Falcon. Wikipedia’s DDoS attack remains under investigation. So does a business email compromise at Toyota Boshoku and a raid on the Oklahoma Law Enforcement Retirement Services. Vulnerable web radios get patches. The US is said to have exfiltrated a HUMINT asset from Russia in 2017. Microsoft patches 79 vu...

A big BEC extracts more than $37 million from a major automotive parts supplier. Wikipedia suffers a DDoS attack in Europe and the Middle East. NERC and FERC get to work. Thrip may really be Billbug, and that’s attribution, not etymology. Was US Cyber Command trolling North Korea on the DPRK’s national day? And what does the Department of Motor Vehicles do with all the data they collect on drivers...

Researchers at McAfee's Advanced Threat Research Team recently published the results of their investigation into a popular VOIP system, where they discovered a well-know, decade-old vulnerability in open source software used on the platform.  Steve Povolny serves as the Head of Advanced Threat Research at McAfee, and he joins us to share their findings. The original research can be found here: htt...

Chinese intelligence and security services have been busy in cyberspace. A third-party customer leaks data it received from Monster.com. There’s a Joker in the Play Store. Some notes from the Billington CyberSecurity Summit: a military look at cyber ops, what CISA’s up to, and some advice from the NCSC. Anti-trust investigations are on the way for Facebook, and it seems likely that Google will be...

A database scraped from Facebook in the bad old days before last year’s reforms holds informaiton about 419 million users. The ransomware threat to election security. Notes from the Billington CyberSecurity Summit. Is your phone reporting back to Mountain View or Cupertino? Probably not, at least not in the way the Twitterverse would have you believe. And the Feds get a guilty plea in the case of...

A look at the ongoing ransomware epidemic, with some speculation about its connection to the criminal economy. Over-the-air provisioning might open Android users to sophisticated phishing approaches. Alleged spammers are indicted in California. And, ZAO, we hardly knew ye. Jonathan Katz from UMD on the evolution of Rowhammer attacks. Tamika Smith speaks with Troy Gill from AppRiver about cities be...

A report on Stuxnet suggests there were at least five and probably six countries whose intelligence services cooperated in the disabling cyberattack against Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. The watering hole Project Zero reported last week seems to have affected Android and Windows as well as iOS devices, and appears directed against China’s Uyghur minority. USBAnywhere vulnerability affects ser...

The Emotet malware came on the scene in 2014 as a banking trojan and has since evolved in sophistication and shifted its business model. Researchers at Bromium have taken a detailed look at Emotet, and malware analyst Alex Holland joins us to share their findings. The research can be found here: https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.bromium.com/resource/emotet-a-technical-analysis-of-the-destru...

Google’s Project Zero releases information on a long-running watering-hole campaign against iPhone users. A dental record backup service is hit by ransomware, and the decryptor the extortionists gave them may not work. Huawei may be in fresh legal hot water over alleged IP theft. Cryptojacking charges are added to those the accused Capital One hacker faces. And we say farewell to a Bletchley Park...

Senior US officials say the June 20th attacks on Iranian networks helped stop Tehran’s attacks on tankers in the Arabian Gulf. TrickBot seems to be going after mobile users’ PINs. Fancy Bear has taken note of machine learning and modified her behavior accordingly. Facebook revises its rules to achieve greater transparency in political and issue advertising. A multinational takedown cleans up the R...

LYCEUM is active against the oil and gas sector in the Middle East. Leaving government service? That nice offer from the head-hunters you got on LinkedIn may be the beginning of an approach by Chinese Intelligence. Autonomous car expert indicted for alleged theft of trade secrets. Imperva discloses a possible breach. Exploitation attempts against VPNs reported. And why did the chicken cross the ro...

Hostinger resets passwords after a breach. Arkose finds that more than half the social media logins they investigated during the recent quarter were fraudulent. US State governors seem likely to call on the National Guard to help with cyber incidents. A new phishing campaign is distributing the Quasar RAT. A new ransomware strain, Nemty, is out in the wild. Fortnite account encrypted? Emsisoft can...

BioWatch info exposed. Patched vulnerabilities are weaponized in the wild. Romance and other scam indictments name eighty defendants. Cryptomining and data exposure. Social engineering with a sheen of multi-factor authentication. Suing the boo birds and the people who let them in. The road to unhappiness is paved with mutually exclusive good intentions. And alleged identity theft from low-earth or...

Researchers at Distil Networks have been tracking online bots targeting ecommerce gift card systems of major online retailers. The threat actors show remarkable resourcefulness and adaptability. Jonathan Butler is technical account team manager at Distil Networks, part of Imperva, and he joins to share their findings. The research can be found here: https://resources.distilnetworks.com/all-blog-po...

Google takes down YouTube accounts spreading disinformation about Hong Kong protests. Cryptomining gear seized at a Ukrainian nuclear plant. CISA outlines its strategic vision. Telcos and law enforcement team up to stop robocalls. Spyware makes it into the Google Play Store twice. And a man gets life in prison for installing hidden cameras. Awais Rashid from University of Bristol on cybersecurity...

A North Korean cyber espionage campaign targets universities, think tanks, and foreign ministries. Chinese cyber spies goes after the healthcare sector. A bug hunter discloses a zero-day for Steam. Updates on the Texas ransomware attacks. Adult sites leak user information. And Veracruz fans hack their club president’s Twitter account to express their displeasure. Guest is Stewart Kantor, CFO and c...

China says Twitter and Facebook are restricting its freedom of speech. The Silence criminal gang has expanded internationally. Google, Mozilla, and Apple are blocking the Kazakh government’s root certificate. A popular Ruby library was backdoored after a developer’s account was hacked. And scammers buy ads to place their phone numbers at the top of search results. Daniel Prince from Lancaster Univ...

Twitter and Facebook shut down Chinese information operations. A jailbreak for the latest version of iOS is out. Facebook may have known about the “view as” bug. Vulnerabilities in Google’s Nest cams are patched. Instagram gets a data abuse bounty program. The FCC released a report on the CenturyLink outage. And adult websites leak information. Michael Sechrist from Booz Allen Hamilton on exploits...

ISIS claims responsibility for Kabul massacre. Huawei gets another temporary reprieve. Local governments in Texas sustain ransomware attacks. Georgia hopes to combat cyberattacks with training. Google cuts a data sharing service. Bulletproof VPN services purchase residential IPs. Smartphones could be used to carry out acoustic side channel attacks. And Hy-Vee warns of a point-of-sale breach. Joe C...