Security News

Facebook said Tuesday that it had removed two networks based in Russia and one linked to the French military, accusing them of carrying out interference campaigns in Africa. Two networks running multiple Facebook accounts were assigned to people associated with the Russian Internet Research Agency, and the third had "Links to individuals associated with French military," the social media platform said.

Vice has a long article about how the US military buys commercial location data worldwide. The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned.

BAE Systems has unveiled a next-generation cyber-threat detection and mitigation solution for U.S. military platforms. The system's cyber resilience capabilities can be integrated into ground, air, and space vehicles to protect our warfighters and platforms from cyber attacks designed to access and degrade mission capabilities.

For the past year, Russia-linked threat actor Strontium has targeted hundreds of organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom to harvest account credentials, Microsoft reveals. On Thursday, Microsoft published information on a newly identified Strontium campaign that focused on harvesting Office365 credentials for tens of thousands of accounts at organizations in the US and UK, many of them directly involved in political elections.

The U.S. military's top cyber official is defending the government's shift toward a more aggressive strategy in cyberspace, saying the mission has evolved over the last decade from "a reactive and defensive posture" to keep pace with sophisticated threats. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the commander of U.S. Cyber Command and the director of the National Security Agency, says in a piece being published Tuesday by the magazine Foreign Affairs that the military's cyber fighters are increasingly prepared to engage in combat with online adversaries rather than wait to repair networks after they've been penetrated.

The APT group Transparent Tribe is mounting an ongoing cyberespionage campaign, researchers said, which is aimed at military and diplomatic targets around the world. Transparent Tribe has updated Crimson RAT for this campaign, the firm said, adding a server-side component used to manage infected client machines as well as a new USBWorm component developed for stealing files from removable drives, spreading across systems by infecting removable media, and downloading and executing a thin-client version of Crimson from a remote server.

Capita's 2017 decision to implement bespoke IT systems on a £1.3bn British Army recruiting contract led to nearly 25,000 fewer applications to join the military in the following year, new figures have revealed. The switching-on of bespoke Defence Recruiting System IT systems contributed to the lowest number of wannabe Army recruits signing up since 2013 as well as a drop of 22 per cent in the number of applicants.

HID Global announced the expansion of its biometrics identification management solutions to police departments and military installations around the globe. "The expansion of our offering to include iOS platforms broadens the adaptability and application of our mobile biometric solutions and equips our customers - from law enforcement to military officials - with the confidence to achieve rapid identification anywhere," said Jessica Westerouen van Meeteren, VP & Managing Director, Citizen Identity with HID Global.

Recent fires and explosions at important Iranian facilities may have been caused deliberately as part of an operation that involved cyberattacks, according to reports. There have been several incidents at major Iranian industrial facilities in recent weeks, including a fire at the Natanz nuclear enrichment site and an explosion at the Parchin military complex near Tehran, which is believed to be involved in the production of missiles.

In a recent campaign, the elusive InvisiMole group has been targeting a small number of high-profile organizations in the military sector and diplomatic missions in Eastern Europe, ESET reports. First reported on in 2018 but active since at least 2013, InvisiMole appears to be tightly connected to the Russia-linked threat group Gamaredon, which is also believed to have started activity in 2013.