Security News
The British government has denied being "Complacent" over the Solarwinds hack as a fed-up peer of the realm urged a minister to "Answer the question". Lord True, the government's Cabinet Office spokesman in the House of Lords, described the attack as "a complex and global cyber incident" and said UK.gov was "Working with international partners to fully understand its scale and any UK impact."
A ransomware gang continues to taunt Windows software developer IObit by hacking its forums to display a ransom demand. On January 16th, the IObit forums were hacked as part of an attack to distribute the DeroHE ransomware.
In general terms, a supply chain refers to the network of people and companies involved in the development of a particular product, not dissimilar to a home construction project that relies on a contractor and a web of subcontractors. The most recent case targeting federal agencies involved Russian government hackers who are believed to have sneaked malicious code into popular software that monitors computer networks of businesses and governments.
Former ADT employee Telesforo Aviles took note when there were attractive women at a home he serviced in the Dallas area. Aviles admitted to regularly adding his own email address to customers' ADT Pulse accounts so he could watch customers in real time without them knowing.
Just days into his leadership role, U.S. President Joe Biden has instructed U.S. intelligence agencies to provide him with a detailed assessment of the SolarWinds hack, which fueled a global cyber espionage campaign impacting many high-profile government agencies and businesses. The U.S. government and others have said Russia is likely behind the highly sophisticated attack on SolarWinds.
U.S. chip-making giant Intel Corp. has acknowledged a website hack and premature data disclosure forced the early release of its earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2020. The discovery led to a decision by Intel to release the financial results six minutes before the market closed.
FireEye Mandiant on Tuesday announced the release of an open source tool designed to check Microsoft 365 tenants for the use of techniques associated with UNC2452, the name currently assigned by the cybersecurity firm to the threat group that attacked IT management company SolarWinds. The SolarWinds supply chain attack has made hundreds of victims, and potentially impacted entities should check their systems for signs of an intrusion associated with this attack.
In the aftermath of the SolarWinds hack, a better understanding of third-party hacks in any update that you provide to your colleagues, bosses, and even the board of directors may be warranted. Any such update that you provide on SolarWinds should certainly cover whether or not your organization is one of the 300,000 SolarWinds customers and whether or not you were one of the 18,000 or so that were using the specific version of Orion that was hacked.
The number of federal agencies and private companies who learn that they have been affected by a massive Russian hack is expected to grow as the investigation into it continues, the U.S. government's chief counterintelligence official said Tuesday. The FBI and other agencies last week attributed the intrusions to Russia as part of what officials described as an intelligence-gathering operation rather than an effort to damage or disrupt U.S. government operations.
Google researchers have detailed a major hacking campaign that was detected in early 2020, which mounted a series of sophisticated attacks, some using zero-day flaws, against Windows and Android platforms. Working together, researchers from Google Project Zero and the Google Threat Analysis Group uncovered the attacks, which were "Performed by a highly sophisticated actor," Ryan from Project Zero wrote in the first of a six-part blog series on their research.