Security News

The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday announced the arrest of Anatoly Legkodymov, the cofounder of Hong Kong-registered cryptocurrency exchange Bitzlato for allegedly processing $700 million in illicit funds. According to court documents, Bitzlato is said to have advertised itself as a virtual currency exchange with minimal identification requirements for its users, breaking the rules requiring the vetting of customers.

The U.S. Department of Justice arrested and charged Russian national Anatoly Legkodymov, the founder of the Hong Kong-registered cryptocurrency exchange Bitzlato, with helping cybercriminals allegedly launder illegally obtained money. Because of "Deficient know-your-customer procedures, Bitzlato allegedly became a haven for criminal proceeds and funds intended for use in criminal activity," the DOJ said.

Two cryptocurrency exchanges have frozen accounts identified as having been used by North Korea's notorious Lazarus Group. Lazarus Group is identified suspected of being a cybercrime crew run by the government of North Korea and is infamous for the WannaCry ransomware, attacking Sony Pictures and stealing secrets from energy companies.

Microsoft warned customers today that Exchange Server 2013 will reach its extended end-of-support date 90 days from now, on April 11, 2023. Exchange Server 2013 was released in January 2013 and has already reached the mainstream end date more than four years ago, in April 2018.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has sued international law firm Covington & Burling for details about 298 of the biz's clients whose information was accessed by a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group in November 2020. In March 2022, the SEC issued a subpoena asking Covington to hand over information about the security breach including, among other things, all of the affected clients' names, and the amount of information that was accessed or stolen, and communications between the law firm and the clients about the exfiltration.

Microsoft says Cuba ransomware threat actors are hacking Microsoft Exchange servers unpatched against a critical server-side request forgery vulnerability also exploited in Play ransomware attacks. Cloud computing provider Rackspace recently confirmed that Play ransomware used a zero-day exploit dubbed OWASSRF targeting this bug to compromise unpatched Microsoft Exchange servers on its network after bypassing ProxyNotShell URL rewrite mitigations.

The first is a Microsoft Exchange elevation of privileges bug tracked as CVE-2022-41080 that can be chained with the CVE-2022-41082 ProxyNotShell bug to gain remote code execution. Texas-based cloud computing provider Rackspace confirmed one week ago that the Play ransomware gang exploited it as a zero-day to bypass Microsoft's ProxyNotShell URL rewrite mitigations and escalate permissions on compromised Exchange servers.

More than 60,000 Microsoft Exchange servers exposed online are yet to be patched against the CVE-2022-41082 remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability, one of the two security flaws targeted by...

Reports this week illustrate how threat actors consider Microsoft Exchange as a prime target for gaining initial access to corporate networks to steal data and deploy ransomware. CrowdStrike researchers reported this week that the Play ransomware operation utilized a new Microsoft Exchange attack dubbed 'OWASSRF' that chained exploits for CVE-2022-41082 and CVE-2022-41080 to gain initial access to corporate networks.

The notorious FIN7 hacking group uses an automated attack system that exploits Microsoft Exchange and SQL injection vulnerabilities to breach corporate networks, steal data, and select targets for ransomware attacks based on financial size. Next, FIN7's internal 'marketing' team scrutinizes new entries and adds comments on the Checkmarks platform to list victims' current revenue, number of employees, domain, headquarters details, and other information that helps pentesters determine if the firm is worth the time and effort of a ransomware attack.