Security News
The United States this week announced that it seized a total of 92 domain names that an Iran-linked adversary was leveraging in a global disinformation campaign. The manner in which these domains were being used was in violation of sanctions the U.S. imposed on both the government of Iran and the IRGC. As of April 2019, the United States has designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization.
Twitter on Wednesday announced that it removed 130 accounts originating from Iran that were aimed at disrupting the first 2020 U.S. presidential debate. The social platform also explains that it was able to quickly identify the accounts and remove them.
Infosec outfit Check Point says it has uncovered a six-year Iranian cyber-spying campaign directed at expats and dissidents worldwide. "The handpicked targets included supporters of Mujahedin-e Khalq and the Azerbaijan National Resistance Organization, two prominent resistance movements that advocate the liberation of Iranian people and minorities within Iran," said Check Point in its research report on RampantKitten.
Where Chinese hackers exploit, Iranians aren't far behind. So says the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is warning that malicious persons from Iran are exploiting a slew of vulns in VPN products from Citrix, F5 Networks and Pulse Secure.
The Department of Justice has indicted two hackers - including one teenager - for allegedly vandalizing more than 50 websites hosted in the U.S. with pro-Iran messages. The two allegedly replaced the content of these websites with pictures of Soleimani against a background of the Iranian flag, along with the message, in English, "Down with America." The two hackers allegedly took credit online for their website defacements.
Tehran on Friday hit back at allegations by Microsoft that Iran based hackers had targeted the US presidential campaigns, declaring it does not care about the election's outcome. Microsoft claimed that it has thwarted cyber attacks by hackers from China, Russia and Iran who have been targeting staff from the campaigns of President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden, ahead of the November vote.
Microsoft believes there have been extensive "Cyberattacks targeting people and organizations involved in the upcoming presidential election," and that foreign government hackers responsible for attacks ahead of the 2016 vote are back with new and nastier tactics. The Windows giant's corporate veep for Customer Security & Trust Tom Burt said both sides of US politics are being attacked, that China, Russia and Iran are all active, and that the spies are also actively targeting UK political parties and other international institutions.
While the ransomware was previously used by advance persistent threat actors, its source code surfaced in March 2020, making it available to a wider breadth of attackers. "The fact Dharma source code has been made widely available led to the increase in the number of operators deploying it," Oleg Skulkin, senior digital forensics specialist with Group-IB, said in an analysis of the attacks posted Monday.
A state-sponsored hacking group linked to Iran accidentally exposed one of its servers, giving researchers access to roughly 40 GB of videos and other files associated with the threat actor's operations. Some of the videos uncovered by IBM on the exposed server showed successful attacks against a member of the U.S. Navy and an officer in the Hellenic Navy, the naval force of Greece.
Google reported on Wednesday that it continues to see attacks launched by the Iran-linked threat group named Charming Kitten against medical and healthcare professionals, including employees of the World Health Organization. The attacks launched by Iranian hackers against WHO staff were first reported by Reuters in early April.