Security News
In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. Based on not much more but these few data points and his knowledge of silicon chip development - he was head of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductors, the company that was to seed Silicon Valley - he said that for the next decade, component counts by area could double every year.
A malware analysis report published on Monday by the U.S. Department of Defense, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the FBI officially attributes a piece of malware named Taidoor to threat actors sponsored by the Chinese government. In 2013, FireEye published a report on Taidoor being used in cyber espionage campaigns aimed at government agencies, think tanks and companies, particularly ones with an interest in Taiwan.
"[The] FBI has high confidence that Chinese government actors are using malware variants in conjunction with proxy servers to maintain a presence on victim networks and to further network exploitation," the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Defense said in a joint advisory. The US Cyber Command has also uploaded four samples of the Taidoor RAT on the public malware repository VirusTotal to let 50+ Antivirus companies check the virus's involvement in other unattributed campaigns.
The European Union imposed its first ever sanctions against alleged cyber attackers on Thursday, targeting Russian and Chinese individuals and a specialist unit of Moscow's GRU military intelligence agency. The best known of the targeted entities is the Main Centre for Special Technologies, a unit of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation - better known as the GRU. This unit, based on Kirova Street in Moscow, is said to have carried out attacks known as NotPetya and EternalPetya in June 2017, hitting EU private companies with ransomware and blocking data.
China's ambassador to Britain has threatened to withdraw Huawei and several billions in investment following the government's decision to ban the manufacturer's products from 5G mobile networks. Following US sanctions aimed at disrupting Huawei's use of US chip design tech, Britain's National Cyber Security Centre declared it would not vet homegrown Chinese chips in Huawei equipment, giving the government justification for a ban on national security grounds.
India has banned 47 more Chinese apps just weeks after blocking the highly popular video-sharing platform TikTok and 58 others over national security and privacy concerns, an information ministry official and media reports said Monday. "We have banned 47 mobile apps from China in this ongoing exercise which highlights the government's seriousness about data privacy and security," the official, who asked to remain anonymous, told AFP. "The order was issued on Friday. Most of these 47 apps are banned for the same reasons as the earlier 59, and many were lite versions or variants of the earlier banned applications."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has issued an alert to inform organizations in the United States of the risk associated with the use of Chinese tax software. Weeks later, Trustwave published information on another piece of malware deployed through mandatory tax software onto the networks of organizations doing business in China.
Chinese drone giant Da Jiang Innovations on Thursday responded to the disclosure of security issues discovered by researchers in one of its Android applications. DJI has always denied these accusations and it has pointed to analysis conducted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Booz Allen Hamilton, which shows that there is no evidence the company's government and professional drones send user data to DJI, China or other third parties.
A Chinese threat actor was observed earlier this month targeting victims in India and Hong Kong with a new variant of the MgBot malware, Malwarebytes reports. The next day, the template would drop the MgBot loader, and Malwarebytes' security researchers observed it leveraging the Application Management service in Windows for the execution and injection of the final payload. Several days later, the same payload was being delivered via an archive containing a document featuring a statement that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made about Hong Kong.
Pakistan's Telecommunications Authority has banned one Chinese-owned social video-streaming app Bigo and given TikTok a final warning that it needs to get its house in order or also face expulsion. The Authority's beef with the apps is not security-related, despite the TikTok mobile apps twice being observed reading from mobile devices' clipboards.