CyberWire Daily

Several Magecart campaigns turn out to be the work of one gang. The unfortunate persistence of DDoS-for-hire services. Ransomware’s growing sophistication as a class of criminal enterprise. Andrea Little Limbago from Interos on supply chain attacks & risks. Our guest is Mark Testoni from SAP's NS2 on how Covid-19 reshaped classified work. And hey kids: the BeagleBoyz are on a crime spree. For link...

New Zealand’s stock exchange has sustained two distributed denial-of-service attacks this week. CISA and FBI issue an alert about GoldenSpy. Two cyber mercenary groups are engaged in industrial espionage for hire. Thailand decides to crack down on sites that host content the government deems illegal. Joe Carrigan looks at new types of crimes made possible by AI. Our guest is Shane Harris from The...

Security trends during the pandemic include shifts in underworld markets and some enduring changes in the way organizations approach cybersecurity. Discount phones come preloaded with adware and fleeceware. TikTok files its lawsuit. Ben Yelin on the Massachusetts Attorney General creating a data privacy office. Our guest is Nitzan Miron from Barracuda Networks on how brick & mortar shops have acce...

Iranian wannabes successfully use Dharma ransomware against soft targets. SourMint hid an ad-fraud and info-stealing package in an SDK. A former US Army officer and sometime Government contractor is charged with working for the GRU. DarkSide ransomware rises as affiliates go into business on their own. Awais Rashid from the University of Bristol on aligning cyber security metrics with business goa...

Managing director of the Cyber Readiness Institute Kiersten Todt shares how she came to be in the cybersecurity industry helping to provide free tools and resources for small businesses through a nonprofit. She describes how her work on the Hill prior to and just after 9/11 changed. Kiersten talks about the diversity of skills that benefit work in cybersecurity and offers her advice on going after...

The goal of malicious activity is to compromise the system to install some unauthorized software. Increasingly that goal is tied to one thing: the user. Over the past several years, we as an industry improved exploit mitigation and the value of working exploits has increased accordingly. Together, these changes have had an impact on the threat landscape. We still see large amounts of active exploi...

Transparent Tribe upgrades Crimson RAT. Cuba, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia are also interested in influencing the upcoming US election. The University of Utah restored from backups after a ransomware attack, but paid the ransom to prevent the crooks from publishing stolen data. Uber’s former CSO has been charged with allegedly covering up a hack the company sustained in 2016. Justin Harvey from A...

Ukraine warns that Russia’s Gamaredon Group is running a phishing campaign ahead of Ukraine’s independence day. CISA and the FBI publish details on a North Korean remote access Trojan. Google patches a serious Gmail flaw. Marriott faces another lawsuit over its 2018 data breach. The WannaRen ransomware operators have released a decryption key. Rob Lee from Dragos with lessons learned from recent v...

Phone spearphishing is catching on after the Twitter hack. Taiwan blames China for hacking government agencies. FritzFrog botnet is cryptomining, for now. Whoever’s behind GoldenSpy is trying to cover their tracks. WastedLocker ransomware is successful without stealing data. The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence releases its final report on Russian interference with the 2016 election. Joe...

Suspected patriotic hacktivists are defacing websites. A cryptomining worm is stealing AWS credentials. Cruise company Carnival suffered a ransomware attack that involved data theft. US measures against Huawei are expected to make things much more difficult for the Chinese company. Ben Yelin on new tools tracking cyber data on US borders. Our guest is Jesse Rothstein from ExtraHop on what happens...

North Korea harasses defectors. Researchers have been exploiting a bug in Emotet to inoculate systems against the malware for the past six months. CISA warns of KONNI spearphishing. RedCurl APT conducts corporate espionage. The US announces more restrictions on Huawei’s access to US-made chips. Chris Novak from Verizon on the evolving role of cyber insurance. Rick Howard on data loss prevention. A...

Founder and CEO Stu Sjouwerman takes us on a journey of how his career developed from starting a software service company to currently focusing on the infosec side of the business where his team essentially helps to create human firewalls. Stu talks about learning all aspects of the business while creating startups and suggests you learn to speak the language of the area you are looking to get int...

Teachers, students, admin, parents: The education sector has possibly the most diverse user base, each requiring its own user privileges, access requirements, and behavioral trends. Yet besides this, there are a number of unique challenges to securing an educational environment, including ensuring broad attack surface protection, minimal false positives, and maintaining a cost-effective security p...

Bitdefender researchers have recently found the APT group StrongPity has been targeting victims in Turkey and Syria. Using watering hole tactics to selectively infect victims and deploying a three-tier C&C infrastructure to thwart forensic investigations, the APT group leveraged Trojanized popular tools, such as archivers, file recovery applications, remote connections applications, utilities, and...

An update on Fancy Bear and its Drovorub rootkit. Karma Panda, a.k.a. CactusPete, is scouting Eastern European financial and military targets with the latest version of a venerable backdoor. How criminals and terrorists exploit COVID-19, and how law enforcement tracks them down. Caleb Barlow from Cynergistek covers security assessments and HIPAA data. Our guest is Ryan Olson from Palo Alto Network...

NSA and FBI release a detailed report on a GRU toolset. North Korea’s Operation Dream Job phishes in Israeli waters. CISA warns of COVID-19 loan relief scams. Malek Ben Salem from Accenture with highlights from their 2020 Security Vision report. Our guest is Mike Hamilton from CI Security, who clears the air on election security and the shift to absentee status. And crooks are using infection and...

Regional rivals tussle in cyberspace, and governments have it out with dissidents and the opposition. Market penetration as an instrument of state power. TikTok gets more unwelcome scrutiny over its privacy practices. Joe Carrigan on a credential harvesting phishing scheme using Zoom as bait. Our guest is Avi Shua from Orca Security on accidental vulnerabilities. And suppressing creepware is appar...

Belarus shuts down its Internet after its incumbent president’s surprising, perhaps implausible, no...really implausible landslide reelection. Papua New Guinea undergoes buyer’s remorse over that Huawei-built National Data Centre it sprung for a couple of years ago. Versions of Chrome found susceptible to CSP rule bypass. Zoom is taken to court over encryption. Patch Tuesday notes. Ben Yelin looks...

A network mapping tool that pings IP addresses looking for a response and can discover host names, open communications ports, operating system names and versions. Written and maintained by Gordon Lyon, a.k.a. Fyodor, it is a free and open source software application used by both system admins and hackers alike and has been a staple in the security community for well over two decades. Learn more ab...

The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released an appreciation of the goals of election interference among three principal US adversaries, Russia, China and Iran. Anomali offers a look at the ransomware-as-a-service market with its research on Smaug. The CyberWire’s Rick Howard continues his exploration of incident response. Andrea Little Limbago from Interos on cyber regional...

Cyber threat intelligence analyst Selena Larson takes us on her career journey from being a journalist to making the switch to industrial security. As a child who wrote a book about a green goldfish who dealt with bullying, Selena always liked investigating and researching things. Specializing in cybersecurity journalism led to the realization of how closely aligned or similar skills are required...

“Cyberbunker” refers to a criminal group that operated a “bulletproof” hosting facility out of an actual military bunker. “Bullet Proof” hosting usually refers to hosting locations in countries with little or corrupt law enforcement, making shutting down criminal activity difficult. Cyberbunker, which is also known as “ZYZtm” and “Calibour”, was a bit different in that it actually operated out of...

President Trump issues Executive Orders restricting TikTok and WeChat in the US. A Chinese APT has been active in industrial espionage against Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. Intel sustains a leak of sensitive company intellectual property. Rewards for Justice communicated to Russian and Iranian individuals by text message. Coordinated inauthenticity from Romanian actors, probably criminals. Mage...

The US announces five new lines of effort for the Clean Network program, and none of them are exactly mash notes for Beijing. The US is also offering rewards of up to ten million dollars for information about foreign computer crimes aimed at interfering with US elections. Australia’s new cybersecurity strategy is out. Maze may have hit Canon. Rob Lee from Dragos addresses speculation of an ICS sup...

NSA, yes, NSA, has some privacy advice. Interpol offers its take on where cybercrime is going during the time of the pandemic. Iran’s Oilrig is getting clever with its data exfiltration. The FBI would like to know when you’re finally going to move on from Windows 7--like, c’mon people. Joe Carrigan looks at pesky ads from the Google Play store. Our guest is Bobby McLernon from Axonius on how feder...