CyberWire Daily

A Chinese-speaking APT is distributing the MysterySnail RAT in what appears to be a cyberespionage campaign. Some users still haven’t patched vulnerable SolarWinds instances. Notes on yesterday’s Patch Tuesday. The US-convened international ransomware conference kicked off today, and Russia wasn’t invited. Former users of a criminal booter service get a stern warning letter from the Dutch police....

Teheran is running password spraying attacks (especially on Thursdays and Sundays). More on the renewed popularity of DDoS attacks. NCSC warns British businesses against ransomware. Two journalists win the Nobel Peace Prize. Joe Carrigan shares his thoughts on GriftHorse. Our guest is Bindu Sundaresan from AT&T Cybersecurity football season and cyber risks. And watch out for small data cards in yo...

Our guest is author and journalist Steven Levy. He’s editor-at-large at Wired and his most recent book is "Facebook: The Inside Story. Steven offers his insights on Facebook’s internal research teams, Ben shares a newly-decided court case on whether Big Tech companies can be sued under the Anti-Terrorism statute, and Dave's got the story of some warrantless surveillance being declared unconstituti...

Lieutenant in the US Navy and Skillbridge Fellow at the CyberWire, Brandon Karpf, knew he wanted to join the military at a young age. He achieved that through the US Naval Academy where he was a member of the men's heavyweight rowing team. Commissioning into the cryptologic field as a naval cryptologic warfare officer, Brandon was sent to MIT for a graduate degree where he experienced the exact op...

Matt Stafford, Senior Threat Intelligence Researcher, from Prevailion joins Dave to talk about their work on "Diving Deep into UNC1151’s Infrastructure: Ghostwriter and beyond." Prevailion’s Adversarial Counterintelligence Team (PACT) used advanced infrastructure hunting techniques and Prevailion’s visibility into threat actor infrastructure creation to uncover previously unknown domains associate...

Google warns fourteen-thousand Gmail users that Fancy Bear has probably been after their passwords. FIN12, a fast-running ransomware group, is after hospitals’ and healthcare providers’ money. BlackMatter remains active against the agriculture sector. REvil is back and talking on the RAMP forum, but so far it’s getting a chilly reception. Twitch traces its vulnerability to a server misconfiguratio...

Cyberespionage seems undeterred by stern warnings. DDoS hits the Philippine Senate. The US Department of Homeland Security intends to issue cybersecurity regulations for passenger rail and airlines. The US Department of Justice intends to use the False Claims Act to bring civil actions against government contractors who fail to follow “recognized cybersecurity standards.” An update on the Twitch b...

Twitch is breached. A newly discovered Iranian threat group is described. A Chinese cyberespionage campaign in India proceeds by phishing. SafeMoon alt-coin is trendy phishbait in criminal circles. As the US prepares to convene an anti-ransomware conference, Russian gangs show no signs of slacking off. Betsy Carmelite from BAH on AI/ ML in cyber defensive operations. Our guest is Adam Flatley of R...

Facebook restores service after dealing with an accidental BGP configuration issue. There’s now a data auction site for AvosLocker ransomware. Atom Silo ransomware is quiet, patient, and stealthy. The state of investigation into those two guys collared on a ransomware beef in Kyiv last week. Ben Yelin is skeptical of data privacy poll results. Our guest is Microsoft’s Ann Johnson, host of the newe...

The Pandora Papers leak erstwhile private financial transactions by the rich and well-connected (and it’s 150 mainstream news organizations who cooperated in bringing them to light). Flubot is using itself to scare victims into installing Flubot. Coinbase thieves exploited account recovery systems to obtain 2FA credentials. The US plans to convene an international conference on fighting cybercrime...

Product Manager in Anti-Fraud Solutions at SpyCloud, Pattie Dillon shares her journey from raising her family to specializing in the anti-fraud space. Upon reentering the workforce, Pattie worked on identity verification and developed a system with privacy concerns in mind. She moved to work in gift cards and was exposed to money laundering. Traveling along the fraud spectrum, Pattie learned about...

Moving to the cloud creates a tremendous opportunity to get security right and reduce the risk of data breach. But most cloud security initiatives get underway after services are deployed in the cloud. It’s frustrating when major breaches resulting from basic mistakes, like S3 buckets left unsecured or secrets exposed. Continually checking for risky configurations and unusual behavior in cloud log...

Dan Petro, Lead Researcher, and Allan Cecil, Security Consultant, from Bishop Fox join Dave to share their research "You're Doing IoT RNG," that they presented at DefCon 29. There’s a crack in the foundation of Internet of Things (IoT) security, one that affects 35 billion devices worldwide. Basically, every IoT device with a hardware random number generator (RNG) contains a serious vulnerability...

A malware campaign offers bogus protection against Pegasus surveillance. A new APT, ChamelGang, is found active against targets in at least ten countries. A ransomware gang can’t get its decryptor right. A proof-of-concept shows that charges can be made from a non-contact Visa card in an iPhone wallet. David Dufour from Webroot warns of potential perils in cyber insurance. Our guest is Shamla Naid...

GriftHorse will subscribe afflicted Android users to premium services they never knew they’d signed up for (and wouldn’t want if they did). Facebook releases a static analysis tool it uses internally to check apps for security issues. Speculation about what put Group-IB’s CEO in hot water with the Kremlin. A look from NSA about where the major nation-state cyberthreats currently stand. Malek Ben S...

Distributed denial-of-service attacks have been making a comeback, and many of them represent criminal extortion attempts. A major British payroll provider is recovering from a cyberattack, but it’s not providing much information on the nature of that attack. Russian authorities arrest the founder of Group-IB on treason charges. Johannes Ullrich from SANS on Out of Band Phishing Using SMS messages...

The triumphant homecoming of Huawei’s CFO. Microsoft describes the FoggyWeb backdoor, a significant cyberespionage tool. Kaspersky looks at the BloodyStealer Trojan and finds it especially risky to gamers. A novel approach to distributed denial-of-service. Apple looks into those iPhone zero-days. Joe Carrigan looks at the latest offerings in passwordless authentication. Our guest is Mathieu Gorge...

The EU publicly blames Russia for GhostWriter, and counsels Moscow to amend its ways. Finland’s security services warn of foreign cyberespionage and influence threats. Zoombombing at the highest levels in Cambodia. A ransomware operation, “Colossus,” is described. Conti is back, as predicted, and has hit a major European call center. Dinah Davis from Arctic Wolf on cybersecurity learning standards...

Host of the CyberWire Podcast, Dave Bittner, wanted to work with the Muppets, so naturally he landed in cybersecurity. Dave and his Cookie Monster puppet spent much of his childhood putting on shows for his parents friends. During one of those performances, he was discovered and got his start at the local PBS station. A radio, television and film major in college, Dave owned his own company and as...

The commonly held, idealized picture of technology is that tech makes our lives easier, safer, and better in just about every respect. But an unintended consequence of that picture is an unjustified assumption that companies will sell more products if they serve the public interest, and that may not be so. On the consumer side, personal technology investments are often a race to the price bottom,...

Guest Ariel Zelivansky, Senior Manager of Security Research at Palo Alto Networks, joins Dave to discuss Unit 42's work on the first cross-account container takeover in the public cloud. The Unit 42 Threat Intelligence team has identified the first known vulnerability that could enable one user of a public cloud service to break out of their environment and execute code on environments belonging t...

Someone is phishing for Russian rocketeers. The Port of Houston discloses a cyberattack, which the Port says it deflected before it had operational consequences. Ransomware gangs are up and active, and the US is considering mandatory reporting by victims as a defensive policy. Pegasus spyware is said to have been found in the phones of five French government ministers. Johannes Ullrich from the SA...

Ransomware hits a second US Midwestern farm co-op. The US House hears from the FBI that Russia seems not to have modified its toleration of privateering gangs (at least yet). A new APT, “FamousSparrow,” is described. REvil seems to have been--surprise!--cheating its criminal affiliates. Josh Ray from Accenture with an update on the Hades Threat Group. Our guest is Tim Eades of vArmour on the urgen...

BlackMatter continues to make a nuisance of itself on a large scale. The US is woofing about taking action against ransomware, and Treasury has sanctioned a rogue cryptocurrency exchange, but some advocate stronger measures. Where did all those Ukrainian cybercriminal chat platforms go? A warning of the “censor mode” in some Chinese manufactured smartphones. Caleb Barlow shares thoughts on CMMC ce...

Ransomware hits an Iowa agricultural cooperative, which doesn’t meet, the criminals say, the standard for “critical infrastructure.” US Treasury Department announces steps against ransomware’s economic support system. Did Kaseya get its REvil decryptor from the FBI? Ben Yelin describes a major federal court victory for security researchers. Our guest is Dave Stapleton from CyberGRX on the rise of...