Security News > 2020 > September

Twitter announced this week that it's taking steps to protect high-profile accounts during the upcoming election in the United States. Twitter is reaching out, via an in-app notification, to the owners of accounts associated with government officials, presidential campaigns, political parties, candidates, major news outlets and political journalists.

Chinese hackers have stolen information from Spanish laboratories working on a vaccine for Covid-19, El Pais newspaper reported Friday. Speaking to journalists on Thursday, Esteban who heads the CNI intelligence services, said there had been a "Qualitative and quantitative" increase in attacks during lockdown, with hackers targeting "Sensitive sectors such as healthcare and pharmaceuticals".

The U.S. will ban the downloads of the Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat on Sunday, with a total ban on the use of the latter, citing national security and data privacy concerns. Some security experts have raised concerns that ByteDance Ltd., the Chinese company that owns TikTok, would maintain access to information on the 100 million TikTok users in the United States, creating a security risk.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control on Thursday announced sanctions against Iran-based cyber threat actor APT39, associated individuals, and a front company named Rana Intelligence Computing Company. Last year, a series of documents supposedly leaked from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security revealed information on the activities of Rana, which was tracking individuals both in Iran and outside the country, and on its members.

California-based machine data analytics company Sumo Logic jumped 22 percent on its first day of trading Thursday, closing the day at nearly $27 a share. Sumo Logic, which will trade on Nasdaq under the symbol SUMO, priced its initial public offering at $22 a share, with 14.8 million shares of its common stock being offered.

The idea behind fieldcraft is in the case of "Dead drops" to create a "Disconect" between a Case Officer under Diplomatic cover and an agent who will end up against a wall one morning if the Case Oficer does not do their fieldcraft job right. Because there is a high probability the case officer is under observation and they have to check for the agents tell frequently their behaviour patterns must cross the place where the tell is thus the security services will also know where a tell might be although they do not know what or where it is.

More details have emerged on the operations of the Chinese state-sponsored threat actor known as APT41 and the links between its members, following the indictment of several alleged members of the group earlier this week. In a report published on Thursday, cybersecurity firm Symantec revealed that it has tracked the activity of these hackers as belonging to two different groups, called Grayfly and Blackfly.

Infosec outfit Check Point says it has uncovered a six-year Iranian cyber-spying campaign directed at expats and dissidents worldwide. "The handpicked targets included supporters of Mujahedin-e Khalq and the Azerbaijan National Resistance Organization, two prominent resistance movements that advocate the liberation of Iranian people and minorities within Iran," said Check Point in its research report on RampantKitten.

Roid security is always a hot topic and almost always for the wrong reason, including Google's failure to prevent malicious apps from being distributed through the Play Store, over-claim of permissions by apps, and privacy leakages. This feature is not new in Android but was earlier only available to use while downloading a new app from the Google Play Store.

A sophisticated and shady website called HK Leaks has ramped up its "Doxxing" - where people's personal details are published online - of Hong Kong political activists, targeting those it says have broken a sweeping new national security law. Promoted by groups linked to the Chinese Communist Party and hosted on Russia-based servers, HK Leaks has become the most prominent doxxing site targeting democracy activists since it first emerged in 2019.