Security News

The SolarWinds hackers took full advantage of what George Kurtz, CEO of top cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, called "Systematic weaknesses" in key elements of Microsoft code to mine at least nine U.S. government agencies - the departments of Justice and Treasury, among them - and more than 100 private companies and think tanks, including software and telecommunications providers. The campaign's "Hallmark" was the intruders' ability to impersonate legitimate users and create counterfeit credentials that let them grab data stored remotely by Microsoft Office, the acting director of the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency, Brandon Wales, told a mid-March congressional hearing.

Recent attacks from Ryuk ransomware operators show that the actors have a new preference when it comes to gaining initial access to the victim network. Security researchers from the threat intelligence boutique Advanced Intelligence observed that Ryuk ransomware attacks this year relied more often on compromising exposed RDP connections to gain an initial foothold on a target network.

A high-level manager and systems administrator associated with the FIN7 threat actor has been sentenced to 10 years in prison, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday. Fedir Hladyr, a 35-year-old Ukrainian national, is said to have played a crucial role in a criminal scheme that compromised tens of millions of debit and credit cards, in addition to aggregating the stolen information, supervising other members of the group, and maintaining the server infrastructure that FIN7 used to attack and control victims' machines.

Sophos cybersecurity expert Chester Wisniewski provides excellent, topical and timely commentary on the FBI's recent use of a malware-like method to forcibly clean up hundreds of servers still infected in the Hafnium aftermath. LISTEN NOW. Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point in the podcast.

The Biden administration on Thursday announced the U.S. is expelling 10 Russian diplomats and imposing sanctions against dozens of companies and people, holding the Kremlin accountable for interference in last year's presidential election and the cyber hacking of federal agencies. U.S. intelligence officials alleged in a declassified report last month that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized influence operations to help Donald Trump in his unsuccessful bid for reelection as president, though there's no evidence Russia or anyone else changed votes or manipulated the outcome.

A former Kansas utility worker has been charged with remotely tampering with a public water system's cleaning procedures, highlighting the difficulty smaller utilities face in protecting against hackers. Wyatt Travnichek, 22, was charged last month with remotely accessing the Post Rock Rural Water District's systems in March 2019, about two months after he quit his job with the utility.

A group of security researchers known as the Secret Club took to Twitter to report a remote code execution bug in the Source 3D game engine developed by Valve and used for building games with tens of millions of unique players. Exceptions are games built with Source 2 or those that run a modified version of the Source engine, like Titanfall.

On the first day of the Pwn2Own 2021 hacking competition, participants earned more than half a million dollars, including $440,000 for demonstrating exploits against Microsoft products. The competition's organizer, Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative, said there were seven attempts on the first day and five of them were successful.

From the Facebook data samples seen by BleepingComputer, almost every user record had a mobile phone number, a Facebook ID, a name, and the member's gender associated with it. Facebook has shed some light on the recent data leak comprising 533 million Facebook user profiles, data from which was posted on a hacker forum last week.

A 22-year-old man from the U.S. state of Kansas has been indicted on charges that he unauthorizedly accessed a public water facility's computer system, jeopardizing the residents' safety and health in the local community. Wyatt A. Travnichek, 22, of Ellsworth County, Kansas, has been charged with one count of tampering with a public water system and one count of reckless damage to a protected computer during unauthorized access, according to the Department of Justice.