Security News > 2023 > January

The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre has issued a warning of Russian and Iranian state-sponsored hackers increasingly targeting organizations and individuals. More specifically, the country's cybersecurity agency has identified a spike in spear-phishing attacks attributed to threat actors tracked as SEABORGIUM and TA453.

Europol supported the German, Dutch and US authorities in taking down the infrastructure of the prolific HIVE ransomware.In the last year, HIVE ransomware has been identified as a major threat as it has been used to compromise and encrypt the data and computer systems of large IT and oil multinationals in the EU and the USA. Since June 2021, over 1 500 companies from over 80 countries worldwide have fallen victim to HIVE associates and lost almost EUR 100 million in ransom payments.

The infrastructure associated with the Hive ransomware-as-a-service operation has been seized as part of a coordinated law enforcement effort involving 13 countries. "Law enforcement identified the decryption keys and shared them with many of the victims, helping them regain access to their data without paying the cybercriminals," Europol said in a statement.

Google on Thursday disclosed it took steps to dismantle over 50,000 instances of activity orchestrated by a pro-Chinese influence operation known as DRAGONBRIDGE in 2022. "Most DRAGONBRIDGE activity is low quality content without a political message, populated across many channels and blogs," the company's Threat Analysis Group said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

The Hive ransomware operation's Tor payment and data leak sites were seized as part of an international law enforcement operation after the FBI infiltrated the gang's infrastructure last July. Today, the US Department of Justice and Europol announced that an international law enforcement operation secretly infiltrated the Hive ransomware gang's infrastructure in July 2022, when they secretly began monitoring the operation for five months.

Today, the Hive ransomware Tor payment and data leak sites were seized as part of an international law enforcement operation involving the US Department of Justice, FBI, Secret Service, Europol, and Germany's BKA and Polizei. The seizure notice on the Tor sites also lists a wide range of other countries involved in the law enforcement operation, including Canda, France, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Proof-of-concept (Poc) code has been released for a now-patched high-severity security flaw in the Windows CryptoAPI that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the U.K. National Cyber...

A Yandex source code repository allegedly stolen by a former employee of the Russian technology company has been leaked as a Torrent on a popular hacking forum.In a statement to BleepingComputer, Yandex said their systems were not hacked, and a former employee leaked the source code repository.

Akamai researchers have published a PoC exploit for a critical vulnerability in Windows CryptoAPI, which validates public key certificates. "An attacker could manipulate an existing public x.509 certificate to spoof their identity and perform actions such as authentication or code signing as the targeted certificate," Microsoft said in October 2022, when they announced fixes for vulnerable Windows and Windows Server versions.

New research has linked the operations of a politically motivated hacktivist group known as Moses Staff to another nascent threat actor named Abraham's Ax that emerged in November 2022. The geopolitical group is believed to be sponsored by the Iranian government and has since been linked to a string of espionage and sabotage attacks that make use of tools like StrifeWater RAT and open source utilities such as DiskCryptor to harvest sensitive information and lock victim data on infected hosts.