CyberWire Daily

Proactive, efficient threat mitigation and risk management require understanding adversaries’ fundamental thought processes, not just their tools and methods. Cyber threat intelligence analysts combed through 15 years (2004 to 2019) of public sources that have documented the activities of one prolific threat actor, Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU. Analysis shows that the timing, tar...

Twitter’s transparency efforts see through accounts being run by Chinese, Russian, and Turkish actors. Zoom is working to both comply with Chinese law and contain the reputational damage involved in doing so. Industrial firms recover from Ekans infestations. Caleb Barlow from CynergisTek on how hospital CISOs are dealing with the COVID-19 situation. Our guest is Ronald Eddings from Palo Alto Netwo...

The Gamaredon Group is back, and what’s their secret? Like Crazy Eddie’s, it’s volume! Doxing during times of unrest. Phoney contact-tracing apps are snooping on personal information in at least ten countries. Thanos is a criminal favorite in the ransomware-as-a-service market. Another skirmish in the Crypto Wars is brewing up on Capitol Hill. David Dufour from Webroot on how organizations can suc...

Notes on Patch Tuesday--it was a fairly big one this time. Honda continues its investigation of the incident it sustained over the weekend, and outsiders see it as a ransomware attack. Facebook is said to have developed a Tails zero-day to help the FBI with a notorious case. Crooks are turning to search engine optimization. IBM and Google cloud services recovered quickly from outages. You’re unlik...

Commercialized hacking-for-hire is traced to an Indian firm, but it’s probably not an isolated problem. Ransomware shuts down Honda production lines in three continents. Criminals develop and distribute an anti-DDoS tool to help keep the dark web souks responsive and available. Ben Yelin revisits Twitter’s flagging or removing the U.S. President’s tweets. Our guest is Jeremy Oddo from The Third Fl...

South and Southwest Asian regional rivalries play out in cyberspace. Election interference could move from disruptive influence operations to actual vote manipulation. Someone is spearphishing leaders in Germany’s PPE task force. Nations move to restrict dependence on foreign companies in their infrastructure. Justin Harvey from Accenture on the train of thought behind breach disclosure. Our own R...

Cyber analyst, Tracy Maleeff, shares her unexpected journey from the library to cybersecurity and offers advice for those both seeking to make a change and those doing the hiring. It's not just about the invitation, it's more than that. Our thanks to Tracy for sharing her story with us.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Earlier this year, a Virgin Media database containing the personal details of 900,000 people was discovered to be unsecured and accessible online for 10 months. The breach was discovered by researchers at the security firm TurgenSec. This breach had major implications under GDPR.  Joining us in this week's Research Saturday are George Punter and Peter Hansen from TurgenSec to talk about the discov...

It’s mostly cyberespionage today, with an admixture of influence operations. Google has warned both major US Presidential campaigns that Chinese and Iranian intelligence services are after their staffers’ email accounts, so far apparently without much success. Russia, China, and Iran devote some purposive media attention to US civil unrest. Johannes Ullrich from SANS on malicious PowerPoint add-in...

Nuisance-level hacktivism continues to surround US protests. The Higaisa APT is active in Southeast Asia. Goblin Panda is back, with USB-borne malware. A new strain of ransomware is described: “Tycoon.” The EU considers whether to sanction Russia over the GRU’s hack of Germany’s Bundestag. CISA launches a new public resource for cybersecurity. Zulfikar Ramzan from RSA on cybersecurity and digital...

Protest groups sustain DDoS attacks, too. Old school denial-of-service afflicts police radio networks in Chicago: they’re being jammed with talk, music, and other noise. Influencers and wannabes continue to use unrest as an occasion for on-line branding. The Sodinokibi gang is selling data stolen in ransomware attacks, and Maze seems to be establishing a criminal cartel. Is email to voting what sh...

Unrest accompanied by misinformation, disinformation, and Anonymous theater. Booter hacktivism. Extremist inauthenticity. The Cyberspace Solarium Commission releases its white paper on the pandemic’s lessons for cybersecurity. Joe Carrigan unpacks Casio executing a DMCA takedown on a hardware hack. Our guest is Herb Stapleton from the FBI on the 20 year anniversary of the IC3. And the UK’s Test an...

Hacking, and more claims of hacking, surround the unrest in Minnesota. Data breach at Amtrak Guest Rewards. More companies found port scanning. Four cybersecurity lessons from the pandemic. David Dufour from Webroot with an overview of online scams his team is tracking during COVID-19, Our own Rick Howard compares resiliency with business continuity. And a new 5G device is not only holographic, bu...

In this episode of CyberWire-X, Rick Howard, the CyberWire’s Chief Analyst, interviews security thought leaders on the strategy and tactics to extend the security controls we’ve typically used to protect our handful of remote employees in the past to today, during the pandemic, that requires us to deploy flexible but equivalent controls at scale to everybody in the organization. Joining us is Bob...

Working with many different honeypot implementations, a security researcher did an experiment expanding on that setting up a simple docker image with SSH, running a guessable root password. The catch? What happened in the next 24 hours was unexpected. Joining us in this week's Research Saturday to talk about his experiment is Larry Cashdollar of Akamai.  The research can be found here:  A Brief Hi...

NSA warns that the GRU’s Sandworm outfit has been actively exploiting a known vulnerability in Exim. Someone is attacking industrial targets in Japan and Europe using steganography and other evasive tactics. NTT Communications is breached, and Michigan State University sustains a ransomware attack. Ben Yelin unpacks the President’s executive order aimed at social media companies. Our guest is Vik...

Hackers-for-hire find criminal work during the pandemic. The US Department of Energy is said to have taken possession of a Chinese-manufactured transformer. US President Trump may be considering an Executive Order about the legal status of social media. Contact-tracing apps in France and the UK are scrutinized for privacy. Ben Yelin from with the latest iPhone cracking case between the FBI and App...

Berserk Bear is back, and snuffling around Germany’s infrastructure. Two new Android issues surface. India opens up the source code for its COVID-19 contact-tracing app as such technological adjuncts to public health continue to arouse privacy concerns. [F]Unicorn poses as Italy’s Immuni app. An alleged FIN7 gangster is arrested. Australia’s Data61 urges companies not to scrimp on R&D. Joe Carriga...

Turla tunes its tools. The commodity Trojan AnarchyGrabber is now stealing passwords. A new iOS jailbreak has been released. The UK reconsiders its decision to allow Huawei into its 5G networks. A tech group lobbies the US House against warrantless inspection of searches. Remote work’s regulatory risk. COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Hackers say they’re vigilantes. Our own Rick Howard on intrusion k...

In December 2019, the GOLD VILLAGE threat group that operates the Maze ransomware created a public website to name and shame victims. The threat actors used the website to dump data they exfiltrated from victims' networks before they deployed the ransomware. Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) researchers have observed several ransomware operators following suit. Joining us in this week's Resear...

Indonesia’s election database has leaked, and PII is for sale in the dark web. Phishing campaigns abuse Firebase. The Shiny Hunters are selling Mathway user records. US agencies warn of COVID-19-themed criminal campaigns. Contact tracing technology hits a rough patch. Johannes Ullrich from SANS on phishing PDFs with incremental updates. Our guest is author Peter Singer on his new book, Burn-In. An...

Website defacements in Israel may be hacktivist work. Iranian cyberespionage against Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The latest evolution of ZeuS. The Winnti Group is still hacking, and it still likes stealing in-game commodities. Contact tracing during the pandemic proves harder than many thought it would be. Economic trends for the security sector as it prepares to emerge from the general state of emer...

Cyber spies steal prototype missile data. Others hack into South Asian telecoms, and still others go after easyJet passengers’ travel data. Cyberattacks, misinformation, and cyber fraud continue to follow the COVID-19 pandemic. Joe Carrigan weighs in on the Thunderspy vulnerability. Our guest is James Dawson with insights on DMARK threats and why it’s worse during COVID-19. And think twice before...

Foreign intelligence services attribute a recent cyberattack on an Iranian port to Israeli operators. EasyJet discloses a breach of passenger information. Verizon’s annual Data Breach Report is out, and it finds more errors than it does exploits. A look at the Dark Web during the pandemic. US authorities warn local law enforcement to watch for misinformation-driven telecom vandalism. Ben Yelin exp...

European supercomputers were hacked by cryptominers. UK electrical power distributor recovers from its cyberattack. A database containing personal data related to the EU Parliament is found exposed. REvil says it’s got the celebrity goods, but has yet to show its hand. The US and China move into a new round of trade and security conflict. Justin Harvey shares insights on how companies are adjustin...