Security News > 2023 > June > Ex-FBI employee jailed for taking classified material home

Infosec in brief In a case startlingly similar to charges recently unsealed against one-term US president Donald Trump, a former FBI analyst has been jailed for taking sensitive classified material home with her.

The Department of Justice said Kingsbury removed a total of 386 classified documents to her home, which included sensitive national security information that the DoJ said could have "Revealed some of the government's most important and secretive methods of collecting essential national security intelligence" in the wrong hands.

"If simple account credentials are used in a Linux system, a threat actor can log into the system through brute force or a dictionary attack, allowing them to execute malicious commands," the researchers wrote.

The attackers were also seen writing new public and private SSH keys to ensure continued access to the infected system.

Once in, Tsunami can not only run DDoS attacks but also other tasks, including collecting system information and downloading additional payloads, all while communicating with its command-and-control server via the IRC protocol, a decades-old internet chat protocol.

To protect systems against such attacks, the researchers reiterated the need for difficult-to-guess account passwords that are changed periodically and to keep the system patches up to date.

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