Security News
The highest-ranked officer in India's armed forces has admitted that China has cyber-war capabilities that can overwhelm his nation's defenses and suggested that only cross-forces collaboration will get India to parity with its giant neighbor. General Bipin Rawat, a four-star general and since 2020 the first to hold a new role of chief of defense staff, offered that assessment yesterday in a talk hosted by Indian think tank the Vivekananda International Foundation.
Indian digital financial services platform Mobikwik denies claims that almost 8 TB of data put up for sale was allegedly stolen from its servers. The threat actor who put the allegedly stolen data up for sale also created a search portal to allow anyone to check if their data is included in the stolen data.
Researchers have now disclosed more information on how they were able to breach multiple websites of the Indian government. Last month, researchers from the Sakura Samurai hacking group had partially disclosed that they had breached cyber systems of Indian government after finding a large number of critical vulnerabilities.
A new ransomware known as Sarbloh encrypts your files while at the same time delivering a message supporting the protests of Indian farmers. Last year the Indian government passed a new set of laws called the 'Indian agriculture acts of 2020', also known as the Farm Bills, which the government says is necessary to modernize its agricultural industry.
Indian Railways has revealed it has suffered "a number of incidents... regarding breaches in various IT applications" and appears to have blamed some of them on sloppy infosec practices among staff working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The organisation's document [PDF] announcing the cyber-transgressions says "a majority of these are application related," but doesn't explain what applications were affected nor the extent of the intrusions.
Secure-IC and MosChip Technologies announce their strategic partnership to provide turnkey ASIC solutions, expand Secure-IC's global presence to India and support the company growth in the country. Leveraging its IP portfolio of silicon proven SerDes, PLLs and Data converters, MosChip provides complete turn-key mixed signal and edge device ASIC solutions with flexible engagement models from RTL to volume production.
Researchers at mobile security firm Lookout have published information on two recently discovered Android spyware families employed by an advanced persistent threat group named Confucius. For the past several years it also switched to mobile malware, with the first Android surveillanceware ChatSpy being observed in 2018.
Websites of multiple Indian government departments, including national health and welfare agencies, are leaking COVID-19 lab test results for thousands of patients online. This week, while searching for a means to obtain COVID-19 test results online, I accidentally came across what looked like exposed COVID-19 test results for thousands of patients.
An Indian national on Monday was sentenced to 20 years in prison in the Southern District of Texas for operating and funding India-based call centers that defrauded US victims out of millions of dollars between 2013 and 2016. The first-ever large-scale, multi-jurisdictional investigation targeting the India call center scam industry saw the US Department of Homeland Security and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration charging Patel and 60 co-conspirators for orchestrating a "Complex scheme" that involved employees based out of call centers in Ahmedabad masquerading as officials from the IRS and US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The campaign's starting point is an email with an embedded malicious attachment - either in the form of a ZIP file containing an LNK file or a Microsoft Word document - that triggers an infection chain via a series of steps to download the final-stage payload. Aside from identifying three different infection chains, what's notable is the fact that one of them exploited template injection and Microsoft Equation Editor flaw, a 20-year old memory corruption issue in Microsoft Office, which, when exploited successfully, let attackers execute remote code on a vulnerable machine even without user interaction. What's more, the LNK files have a double extension and come with document icons, thereby tricking an unsuspecting victim into opening the file.