Security News > 2024 > March
Paleontologists have discovered a 183-million-year-old species of vampire squid. Prior research suggests that the vampyromorph lived in the shallows off an island that once existed in what is now the heart of the European mainland.
Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guardsman accused of leaking dozens of classified Pentagon documents, is expected to plead guilty in a US court on Monday. A US Air Force report made public in December concluded Teixeira was the only airman behind the leak, though determined that his chain of command bears some responsibility for letting the classified data dump happen on its watch.
NSO Group, the Israel-based maker of super-charged snoopware Pegasus, has been ordered by a federal judge in California to share the source code for "All relevant spyware" with Meta's WhatsApp. The order [PDF] from Judge Phyllis Hamilton follows from WhatsApp's 2019 lawsuit [PDF] against NSO for allegedly spying on 1,400 WhatsApp users.
Ransomware attacks on healthcare over the last few months have been relentless, with numerous ransomware operations targeting hospitals and medical services, causing disruption to patient care and access to prescription drugs in the USA. The most impactful attack of 2024 so far is the attack on UnitedHealth Group's subsidiary Change Healthcare, which has had significant consequences for the US healthcare system. To make matters worse, the BlackCat ransomware operation, aka ALPHV, claims to have stolen 6TB of data from Change Healthcare during the attack, containing the personal information of millions of people.
Russian state hackers are adapting their techniques to target organizations moving to the cloud, an advisory from the UK National Cyber Security Centre and international security agencies has warned. The advisory details how cyber espionage group APT29 is directly targeting weaknesses in cloud services used by victim organizations to gain initial access to their systems.
CISA ordered U.S. Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies to secure their Windows systems against a high-severity vulnerability in the Microsoft Streaming Service that's actively exploited in attacks. Redmond patched the bug during the June 2023 Patch Tuesday, with proof-of-concept exploit code dropping on GitHub three months later, on September 24.
The US Department of Justice has unsealed an indictment accusing an Iranian national of a years-long campaign that compromised hundreds of thousands of accounts and attempting to infiltrate US defense contractors and multiple government agencies. "Nasab participated in a cyber campaign using spear phishing and other hacking techniques to infect more than 200,000 victim devices, many of which contained sensitive or classified defense information," said Damian Williams, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
The Düsseldorf Police in Germany have seized Crimemarket, a massive German-speaking illicit trading platform with over 180,000 users, arresting six people, including one of its operators. Known as Crimemarket, it was the largest cybercrime market in the country and a hub for trading illegal drugs, narcotics, and cybercrime services, while it also hosted tutorials/guides for conducting various crimes.
The Düsseldorf Police in Germany have seized Crimemarket, the largest German-speaking illicit trading platform on the internet, arresting six people, including one of its operators. "In a concerted campaign, investigators across Germany and abroad took action against the largest German-speaking criminal trading platform on the Internet on Thursday evening," reads a machine-translated announcement.
Microsoft has fixed an issue causing some Microsoft 365 users' Outlook desktop clients to stop connecting to email servers via Exchange ActiveSync. Exchange ActiveSync is a synchronization protocol used by Microsoft Exchange to allow users to access their email, calendar, contacts, and tasks.