Security News
It's said that the pair promoted the idea at a conference in 2018 and a few news outlets picked up on that plan and suggested Rongelap could become "The new Hong Kong.". In a May 2021 publication [PDF] the IMF noted the proposal to create a digital economic zone on Rongelap and characterized it as "Envisioned to focus on virtual means of exchange, including virtual assets."
In a statement, the US Department of Justice said: "Uber admitted to and accepted responsibility for the acts of its officers, directors, employees, and agents in concealing its 2016 data breach from the Federal Trade Commission, which at the time of the 2016 breach had a pending investigation into the company's data security practices." ESET researchers have uncovered a fresh sample of macOS malware that uses public cloud services to store payloads, exfiltrate data and execute command and control of infected machines.
Federal law enforcement officials this week said they seized about $500,000 that healthcare facilities in the United States paid to the Maui ransomware group. In the case involving the Kansas healthcare facility, the hospital paid the $100,000 ransom but also contacted the FBI, which traced the payment through the blockchain and identified accounts used by money launderers in China who were working with the North Korean-backed ransomware group.
The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday announced the seizure of three domains used by cybercriminals to trade stolen personal information and facilitate distributed denial-of-service attacks for hire. The former of which allowed its users to traffic hacked personal data and offered a searchable database containing illegally amassed information obtained from over 10,000 data breaches.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced the revision of its policy regarding charging violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which says that, among other things, good-faith security researchers will no longer be charged and prosecuted. Good faith security research means accessing a computer solely for purposes of good-faith testing, investigation, and/or correction of a security flaw or vulnerability, where such activity is carried out in a manner designed to avoid any harm to individuals or the public, and where the information derived from the activity is used primarily to promote the security or safety of the class of devices, machines, or online services to which the accessed computer belongs, or those who use such devices, machines, or online services.
With this policy update, the DOJ is separating cases of good-faith security research from ill-intended hacking, which were previously distinguished by a blurred line that frequently placed ethical security research in a problematic, gray legal area. Under these new policies, software testing, investigation, security flaw analysis, and network breaches intended to promote the security and safety of the target devices or services are not to be prosecuted by federal prosecutors.
On Monday, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York revealed criminal charges against 55 year-old cardiologist Moises Luis Zagala Gonzalez of Cuidad Bolivar, Venezuela accusing him of being the mastermind behind the prolific Thanos malware. The inditement alleges he "Designed multiple ransomware tools-malicious software that cybercriminals use to extort money from companies, nonprofits and other institutions, by encrypting those files and then demanding a ransom for the decryption keys. Zagala sold or rented out his software to hackers who used it to attack computer networks."
Federal regulators are taking a closer look at Google's planned $5.4 billion acquisition of Mandiant, a deal designed to boost the web giant's public cloud's cybersecurity capabilities. In announcing its bid March 8, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a statement that "Organizations around the world are facing unprecedented cybersecurity challenges as the sophistication and severity of attacks that were previously used to target major governments are now being used to target companies in every industry."
Researchers have compared Triton's targeting of industrial control systems to malware used in the watershed attacks Stuxnet and Industroyer/Crashoverride, the latter of which is a backdoor that targets ICS and which took down the Ukrainian power grid in Kiev in 2016. The indictment that names the FSB officers alleges that, between 2012 and 2017, Akulov, Gavrilov, Tyukov and their co-conspirators engaged in computer intrusions, including supply chain attacks, "In furtherance of the Russian government's efforts to maintain surreptitious, unauthorized and persistent access to the computer networks of companies and organizations in the international energy sector, including oil and gas firms, nuclear power plants, and utility and power transmission companies."
The United States Department of Justice has unsealed a pair of indictments that detail alleged Russian government hackers' efforts to use supply chain attacks and malware in an attempt to compromise and control critical infrastructure around the world - including at least one nuclear power plant. The trio allegedly spent 2012 to 2014 working on a project code-named "Dragonfly" during which a supply chain attack targeted updates of industrial control systems and supervisory control and data acquisition systems.