CyberWire Daily

Huawei is on the US Entity List, and US exporters have been quick to notice and cut the Shenzhen company off. Security concerns are now expected to shift to the undersea cable market. Hacktivism seems to have gone into eclipse. The EU enacts a sanctions regime to deter election hacking. Facebook shutters inauthentic accounts targeting African politics. Salesforce is restoring service after an unha...

Researchers at Symantec have been tracking an espionage group known as Elfin (aka APT 33) that has targeted dozens of organizations over the past three years, primarily focusing on Saudi Arabia and the United States.  Alan Neville is a principal threat intelligence analyst at Symantec, and he joins us to share their findings. The research can be found here: https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-in...

A Slack vulnerability is disclosed and fixed. And this is not as seen on TV: a real NCIS investigation is likely to occupy real JAGs for some time to come, with implications for military and civilian cyber law. The US is moving rapidly on Huawei and its associated companies: it’s now much harder for US companies to do business with them, and there’s likely to be fallout in other countries as well....

President Trump declares a state of emergency over the threat from foreign adversaries and the companies they control. (And yes, Huawei, he’s looking at you.) Dutch intelligence is said to be investigating the possibility of backdoors in telecommunications networks. Concerns about spyware proliferation rise. Cipher stunting is observed in the wild. Titan security keys are spoofable. Meaconing airl...

Chinese domestic and foreign intelligence services are cooperating more closely in cyberspace. Another set of speculative execution issues is found in Intel chips. This month’s Patch Tuesday was a big one. CrowdStrike files for its long-anticipated IPO. WhatsApp, spyware, and zero-days. Apple may be required to open its devices to apps from third-party stores. The Cyber Solarium is ready to get st...

Russian operators breached two Florida counties’ voting systems, but without altering vote counts. Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro are thought to be the security vendors hit by Fxmsp cybercrminals. WhatApp patches a flaw exploited to install spyware. The Equifax breach seems to have cost the company $1.4 billion. Companies are increasingly aware of data’s potential toxicity. Cisco patches two fla...

Fxmsp criminals are now said to have code from a fourth security company, but none of the claimed victims have been publicly identified. A SharePoint vulnerability is being exploited against unpatched servers in the wild. The G7 are preparing a major exercise to evaluate the financial system’s ability to withstand a major cyberattack. No one is saying what the Anthem hackers were after. Amnesty ta...

Researchers at Blackberry Cylance have been tracking payload obfuscation techniques employed by OceanLotus (APT32), specifically steganography used to hide code within seemingly benign image files. Tom Bonner is director of threat research at Blackberry Cylance, and he joins us to share their findings. The original research can be found here: https://www.cylance.com/en-us/lp/threat-research-and-in...

Fxmsp may have breached three anti-virus companies. US-CERT and CISA warn against a new North Korean malware tool being used by Hidden Cobra: they’re calling it “ElectricFish.” A changing of the guard at Symantec. Former Facebook insiders call for breaking up the company and for more regulation. Facebook disagrees about the breakup, but says it likes the idea of regulation. Two indictments are uns...

The Green Leakers release more information about Iranian cyber operators, including details about MuddyWater and the Rana Institute. A misconfigured GitLab instance exposes data used by Samsung engineers. Thoughts on how AI can shift the advantage to the attacker.  Amazon is after hackers who defrauded sellers. DeepDotWeb proprietors are indicted. “Evil Cippy” does VBA stomping. And a food fight i...

Turla is back, and with a clever backdoor called “LightNeuron.” Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report shows that the C-suite remains a big target of social engineers, that crooks are following companies into the cloud, that ransomware remains popular, and that people seem warier of phishing. Bad actors peddle influence in the EU. Binance gets looted, Baltimore gets hacked. Meny Har from Siem...

Buckeye seems to have reengineered some of Uncle Sam’s cyber tools, and they did it without, apparently, help from the ShadowBrokers. More on airstrikes as retaliation for hacking, with a brief excursus on electronic warfare. Notes on malicious commitment as one of the hazards of open source software development. How big is the dark web? Big enough, but maybe not as big as everyone thinks. And bew...

Tracking a group that’s after the software supply chain. Israel adds airstrikes to the array of responses it’s prepared to make to hackers. The US Federal Trade Commission still doesn’t know how you solve a problem like Mark. Some more notes from last week’s Global Cyber Innovation Summit. Sophos has more details on MegaCortex, a new strain of ransomware. And criminal organizations organize and op...

Researchers at Cisco Talos have been tracking what they believe is a state-sponsored attack on DNS systems, targeting the Middle East and North Africa. This attack has the potential to erode trust and stability of the DNS system, so critical to the global economy. Craig Williams is director of Talos Outreach at Cisco, and he joins us to share their findings.  The original research can be found her...

That cyber incident that affected electrical utilities in the western United States seems to have been a denial-of-service attack. Concerns arise over potential proliferation of Chinese security service tools. Exploit blackmarketeer Volodya and some customers. The Retefe banking Trojan is back. Some new ransomware thinks it’s the moving finger that writes, and, having written, moves on. And some c...

The group behind the Wipro attack has been active since 2015. Office 365 are still being targeted by account takeover attacks. A third-party Android app store is serving malware. The UK Defense Secretary has been sacked over leaked information. The US warned Russia to cease its support of Venezuela’s Chavista regime. Russia’s Internet sovereignty bill is signed into law. And notes on the Global Cy...

In today’s podcast, we hear that a US Energy Department report alludes to a March cyber incident. Citycomp refused to yield to blackmail, so now its client data is being leaked. The US Department of Homeland Security has issued Binding Operational Directive 19-02. A UK judge sentenced Julian Assange to fifty weeks jail for bail jumping. Facebook the privacy-focused initiatives it plans to implemen...

A backdoor turns out to be a familiar kind of Telnet implementation (and it was fixed seven years ago in any case). A large database of US household personally identifiable information was found exposed online, but who owned it remains unclear. The US Department of Homeland Security releases a Critical Functions List. ISIS’s sometime Caliph is back online. And piracy streaming is loaded with malwa...

Vulnerable peer-to-peer software exposes consumer and small-business IoT devices to compromise. A hacker says he’s hacked automotive GPS trackers, all for the good, of course, and could even turn off a car’s engine. Not, you know, that he would. Sri Lanka warns of the possibility of more violence, and journalists wonder if prior restraint of certain speech might be worth considering. Curating app...

Researchers at Ben Gurion University in Israel have developed techniques to infiltrate medical imaging system networks and alter 3D medical scans within, fooling both human and automated examiners with a high rate of success.  Yisroel Mirsky is a cybersecurity researcher and project manager at Ben Gurion University, and he joins us to share what his team discovered. The original research can be fo...

Investigation of the Easter massacres in Sri Lanka continues. For all the concern about online inspiration, some of the coordination seems to have been face-to-face. Symantec describes a cryptojacking campaign, Beapy, that propagates using EternalBlue. An Oracle web server zero-day is reported. Recorded Future describes the commodified black market for credential-stuffing. And there’s a cabinet du...

Sri Lanka’s investigation of the Easter massacres continues, with some ISIS video surfacing. Apps with aggressive adware found in Google Play. Context-aware phishbait may be bringing the Qbot banking Trojan to an email thread near you. Facebook seems to think the FTC is about to hit it hard, and sets aside a rainy day fund. And the Wall Street Market, a contraband souk on the dark web, may be enga...

Sri Lanka investigates a homegrown jihadist group with possible international connections for the Easter massacres. New Zealand is preparing the Christchurch Call to exclude violent terrorist content from the Internet. ShadowHammer moves its supply chain attacks upstream. Carbanak source code seems to have been in VirusTotal for two years. Someone’s spoofing financial institutions. Bots surged upo...

ISIS claims responsibility for the Sri Lankan bombings. The government maintains its declared state of emergency, and has arrested at least forty in the course of its investigation. Check Point describes a spearphishing campaign against embassies in Europe. It’s thought to be the work of the Russian mob. Weak keys let the “Blockchain Bandit” rifle alt-coin wallets. And a disgruntled bug hunter dox...

Sri Lanka clamps down on social media in the wake of Easter massacres. Authorities suspect an Islamist group, but no terrorist organization has so far claimed responsibility. CIA intelligence is said to have the goods on Chinese security services’ hold over Huawei. Marcus Hutchins, also known as MalwareTech, and famous as the sometime hero of the WannaCry kill-switch, has taken a guilty plea to ch...