Security News
A 37-year-old man from New York has been sentenced to four years in prison for buying stolen credit card information and working in cahoots with a cybercrime cartel known as the Infraud Organization. He joined the gang in August 2011 and remained a member for five-and-a-half years.
The inner workings of a cybercriminal group known as the Wizard Spider have been exposed, shedding light on its organizational structure and motivations. The TrickBot operators have also extensively cooperated with Conti, another Russia-linked cybercrime group notorious for offering ransomware-as-a-service packages to its affiliates.
US President Joe Biden has signed into law a bill that aims to improve how the federal government tracks and prosecutes cybercrime. The Better Cybercrime Metrics Act, which Biden signed late last week, requires the Department of Justice to work with the National Academy of Sciences to develop a taxonomy that law enforcement can use to categorize different types of cybercrime.
Witschi, the assistant director for cybercrime threat response and operations at Interpol, told The Register about recent successes that the agency's Gateway cyber-threat intel sharing project has had, and the increasingly well-funded, targeted attacks that law enforcement agencies are trying to prevent. Through the project private-sector security shops including Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Trend Micro, Kaspersky Lab and others share intelligence with Interpol member countries' law enforcement agencies to help them investigate cybercrime and attribute attacks to the various crime rings.
Microsoft and a consortium of cybersecurity companies took legal and technical steps to disrupt the ZLoader botnet, seizing control of 65 domains that were used to control and communicate with the infected hosts. "ZLoader is made up of computing devices in businesses, hospitals, schools, and homes around the world and is run by a global internet-based organized crime gang operating malware as a service that is designed to steal and extort money," Amy Hogan-Burney, general manager of Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, said.
After breaching servers managed by the cybercriminals, security researchers found a connection between Conti ransomware and the recently emerged Karakurt data extortion group, showing that the two gangs are part of the same operation. In a recent report, Infinitum IT details that they were able to gain access to Conti's infrastructure when the Conti leaks started, on February 27, after logging into multiple ProtonMail and Mega storage accounts used by one Conti member.
A coordinated operation conducted by the FBI and its international law enforcement partners has resulted in disrupting business email compromise schemes in several countries. BEC actors are high-level scammers who trick employees of real companies into making payments to bank accounts under their control, pretending to be a business partner or a firm submitting a legitimate payment order.
A Russian national has been indicted by the US DOJ and added to the FBI's Cyber Most Wanted list for allegedly creating and managing a cybercrime marketplace. Igor Dekhtyarchuk, a resident of Russia, was indicted in the Eastern District of Texas for running the cybercrime marketplace that sold credit cards, access to compromised devices or accounts, and personal information.
Microsoft warns of destructive attacks by Lapsus$ cybercrime group. In a blog post published Tuesday, Microsoft provides insight into the group's tactics and techniques and offers tips on how to protect your organization from these attacks.
With not just ransomware gangs raiding network after network, but nation states consciously turning a blind eye to it, today's chief information security officers are caught in a "Perfect storm," says Cybereason CSO Sam Curry. "One of the values that we [CISOs] give an organization is to start thinking about what is that next level? What are they going to pivot to next?".