Security News
A former Cisco employee has pleaded guilty to hacking charges related to him accessing the networking giant's systems and causing damage. A few months after he resigned from the company, he gained unauthorized access to Cisco's AWS cloud infrastructure and deployed code that caused over 450 virtual machines associated with the Cisco Webex Teams application to be deleted.
Tyler C. King, a 31-year-old from Dallas, Texas, was sentenced this week to 57 months in prison for crimes related to the hacking of an unnamed major tech company based in New York. According to the Justice Department, King gained access to the technology firm's systems in 2015 with the help of Ashley St. Andria, who at the time was an employee of the company.
It's a free for all, it seems, as the world has yet to decide on laws and norms regulating cyber attacks and cyber espionage in peacetime, and find a way to make nation-states abide by them. The US has been publicly attributing cyber espionage campaigns to state-backed APTs and regularly releasing technical information related to those campaigns, its legislators have been introducing legislation that would lead to sanctions for foreign individuals engaging in hacking activity that compromises economic and national security or public health, and its Department of Justice has been steadily pushing out indictments against state-backed cyber attackers and spies.
Tens of researchers showcased their work last week at the DEF CON hacking conference. They presented research on hacking phones, cars, satellite communications, traffic lights, smart home devices, printers, and popular software services, among many others.
While China is the bête noire du jour of the US government, Russia is the master of spreading disinformation, fostering conflict, and derailing discourse online, the Black Hat security conference was told today. The basic methods of hacking public opinion are fairly simple, DiResta explained.
Former UK trade minister and current Conservative MP Dr. Liam Fox has been named as the source of hacked trade documents released during last year's British elections. A report from Reuters cited two anonymous sources who say that the 58 year-old Fox, who has since stepped down, had an email account taken over by Russian hackers, who then used it to obtain and release documents about Anglo-American trade talks.
New information suggests that at least two of them operated a service that resold access to Twitter employees for the purposes of modifying or seizing control of prized Twitter profiles. SWIMPING. My July 15 story observed there were strong indications that the people involved in the Twitter hack have connections to SIM swapping, an increasingly rampant form of crime that involves bribing, hacking or coercing employees at mobile phone and social media companies into providing access to a target's account.
Beijing accused the United States of "Slander" on Wednesday after two Chinese nationals were indicted for seeking to steal coronavirus vaccine research and hacking hundreds of companies. "The Chinese government is a staunch defender of cyber security, and has always opposed and cracked down on cyber attacks and cyber crime in all forms," said foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin.
Citrix informed customers this week that it has patched a vulnerability in its Workspace app that can allow an attacker to remotely hack the computer running the affected application. The security hole, tracked as CVE-2020-8207 and classified as high severity, affects the automatic update service used by the Citrix Workspace app for Windows, and it can be exploited by a local attacker to escalate privileges or by a remote attacker for arbitrary command execution.
The United States Department of Justice on Tuesday announced charges against two individuals for the hacking of hundreds of organizations worldwide, including governments and COVID-19 responders. The two, Li Xiaoyu, 34, and Dong Jiazhi, 33, both nationals and residents of China, are accused to have conducted computer intrusion activities on behalf of the Chinese government for more than 10 years.