CyberWire Daily

An old leaked database has been delivered into the hands of skids. (The news isn’t that the data are out there; it’s that the skids now have it. For free.) CISA and the FBI warn that APTs are scanning for vulnerable Fortinet instances. Cryptojackers pan for alt-coin in GitHub’s infrastructure. Holiday Bear may have looked for network defenders. Threats to water utilities. Johannes Ullrich explains...

Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer for Corelight Greg Bell describes the twists and turns of his career bringing him back to his childhood joy of computers. Working in a myriad of fields from human rights to Hollywood to writing a history of conspiracy belief before pivoting back to technology. Focusing on the relationships within the open source community, Greg works to change and improve the...

Guests Fernando Martinez and Tom Hegel from AT&T Alien Labs join Dave to discuss their team's research "Malware using new Ezuri memory loader." Multiple threat actors have recently started using a Go language (Golang) tool to act as a packer and avoid Antivirus detection. Additionally, the Ezuri memory loader tool acts as a malware loader and executes its payload in memory, without writing the fil...

Goblin Panda might be out and about. Ubiquiti confirms that an extortion attempt was made, but says the attempted attack on data and source code was unsuccessful. The Accellion compromise claims more university victims. It’s National Supply Chain Integrity Awareness Month in the US. BOLO Mr. Korhsunov. Andrea Little Limbago from Interos on supply chain resilience in a time of tectonic geopolitical...

US Cyber Command and CISA plan to publish an analysis of the malware Holiday Bear used against SolarWinds. The DPRK is again phishing for security researchers. Exchange Server exploitation continues. Stone Panda goes after industrial data in Japan. Human error remains the principal source of cyber risk. A US Executive Order on cyber hygiene and breach disclosure nears the President’s desk. David D...

Charming Kitten is back, and interested in medical researchers’ credentials. Russian services appear to have been reading some US State Department emails (it’s thought their access was confined to unclassified systems). Risk management practices and questions about the risks of growing too blasé about “management.” Recognizing the approach of an intelligence officer. Volumetric attacks are up. Joe...

The US Administration continues to prepare its response to Holiday Bear’s romp through the SolarWinds supply chain. Congress is asking for details on what was compromised in the incident, and why the Department of Homeland Security failed to detect the intrusion. The UN offers some recommendations on norms of conduct in cyberspace. Ben Yelin on a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling that phone passcode...

German politicians’ emails are under attack, and the GRU is the prime suspect. Australia’s Nine Network was knocked off the air by a cyberattack, and a nation-state operation is suspected. PHP takes steps to protect itself from an attempt to insert a backdoor in its source code. Apple fixes browser engine bugs. FatFace pays the ransom. Project Zero caught a Western counterterror operation. Betsy C...

Vice President of Raytheon's Cyber Offense, Defense Experts Teresa Shea speaks of her journey from math to adapting new technologies on the cutting edge, With a love of math, Teresa was offered a scholarship by the Society of Women Engineering and decided to pursue a degree in electrical engineering. Unsurprisingly, there were few other women in her program, Teresa interned with and then proceeded...

Guest Sergio Caltagirone from Dragos joins us to take us through their 2020 ICS Cybersecurity Year in Review report. Dragos's annual ICS Year in Review provides an overview and analysis of ICS vulnerabilities, global threat activity targeting industrial environments, and industry trends and observations gathered from customer engagements worldwide. The goal of the report is to give asset owners an...

Criminal-on-criminal cyber crime. Ransomware hits European and North American businesses. Big Tech goes (virtually) to Capitol Hill to talk disinformation and Section 230. The head or NSA and US Cyber Command discusses election security and cyber defense with the Senate Armed Services Committee. Russia complains of a US assault on Russia’s “civilizational pillars.” Accenture’s Josh Ray shares his...

The FBI warns organizations that Mamba ransomware is out and about in a newly evolved form. Facebook takes down a Chinese cyberespionage operation targeting Uyghurs. Huawei joins the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Slack thinks it might have made a security and privacy misstep. Caleb Barlow from CynergisTek on Healthcare Interoperability. Our guest is Roei Amit from Deep Instinct on their 202...

COVID-themed phishbait has shifted to vaccines. Notes on the ransomware exploiting vulnerable Exchange Servers. Purple Fox gets wormy. Sierra Wireless halts operations to remediate a ransomware incident. Notes on ICS vulnerabilities. More victims of third-party risk. Joe Carrigan looks at SMS security issues. Our guest is Ron Brash from Verve Industrial with takeaways from their 2020 ICS Vulnerabi...

The CyberWire partners with Recorded Future's threat intelligence podcast and our Dave Bittner is the host. It's a weekly show that comes out each Monday afternoon. We thought you might want to check it out and are adding it to our feed today. We hope you like it and consider subscribing in your favorite podcast app. The COVID-19 global pandemic has, predictably, attracted bad actors intent on usi...

Exchange Server patching is going well, they say, but they also say that patching isn’t enough. Crooks are continuing to look for unpatched instances, and even in the patched systems, you’ve got to check to make sure the bad actors have been found and ejected. AFCEA and Shell both disclose being affected by third-party breaches. Citizen Lab sees no particular problem with TikTok. Ben Yelin ponders...

Indian authorities warn the country’s transportation sector that it may be a target for cyberespionage. Google’s Project Zero describes an elaborate and expensive campaign that exploited zero-day vulnerabilities. The SilverFish threat group is elaborate, well-resourced, and well-organized. Threat actors are quietly altering mailbox permissions. REvil is back. Some say “yes” to Moscow; others say “...

Chief Security Officer of Microsoft Canada Kevin Magee shares his background as a historian and how it applies to his work in cybersecurity. Likening himself to a dashing Indiana Jones, Kevin talks about how he sees history unfolding and the most interesting things right now are happening in security. Spending time tinkering with things in the university's computer room under the stairs gave way t...

Guest Jen Miller-Osborn from Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 joins us to discuss their research into BendyBear. Highly malleable, highly sophisticated and over 10,000 bytes of machine code. The code behavior and features strongly correlate with that of the WaterBear malware family, which has been active since as early as 2009. The malware is associated with the cyber espionage group BlackTech, which m...

Helsinki blames Beijing’s APT31 for cyberespionage against Finland’s parliament. Russia withdraws its ambassador to the US, calling him home for consultation, post the US IC’s report on election influence ops. Risk management for industrial control systems, and especially for an often overlooked part of the power grid. Johannes Ullrich from SANS on Evading Anti-Malware Sandboxes with New CPU Archi...

Disinformation about a radiation leak that wasn’t. Another warning about Trickbot. The FBI says cybercrime cost victims more than $4.2 billion last year. Investigation and remediation of the SolarWinds and Exchange Server compromises continue. Crypters become a commodity for malware developers. Robert M. Lee from Dragos on lessons from the recent Texas power outages. Our guest is Bob Shaker from N...

The US Intelligence Community has released its report on 2020 foreign election meddling. It found no successful hacking, but a lot of clever influence operations. Ukraine says it stopped a significant Russian cyberespionage campaign. Recovery from the SolarWinds and Exchange Server compromises continues. Joe Carrigan shares thoughts on the Verkada hack. Our guest is Oscar Pedroso from Thimble on g...

McAfee describes Operation Diànxùn, a probable Chinese collection effort directed against telecoms and 5G technology. Organizations around the world continue to work to thwart exploitation of Exchange Server vulnerabilities. What’s a webshell, and what can it do? Ben Yelin looks at cell phone data gathered from the US Capitol riot. Our guest is Ross Rustici from ZeroFOX on the evolution of ransomw...

Microsoft is looking for a possible leak behind the spread of Exchange Server exploits, and hackers piggyback on webshells placed by other threat actors. The US Government continues to mull how to respond to Holiday Bear and Hafnium. Britain’s PM calls for greater offensive cyber capabilities. India looks for ways of countering China in cyberspace. Sky Global executives indicted for alleged racket...

The SolarWinds Orion SUNBURST exploit forced organizations to determine whether and to what extent they’d been compromised. It’s not enough to eject the intruders and their malware from the networks. Affected organizations also need to know what systems and data had been breached, and for how long. The adversary behind SUNBURST is advanced, quietly breaching the perimeter and moving freely to acce...

Coming from her love of math, VP of R&D at Arctic Wolf Networks Dinah Davis shares how she arrived in the cybersecurity industry after finding her niche. Dinah recalls how at a time of indecision, a computer course at university and a job with the Canadian government helped to solidify her career direction. Dinah mentions how "security and cryptography specifically was this perfect mix of real wor...