Security News
The FBI took down a botnet of small office/home office routers used by Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff in spearphishing and credential theft attacks targeting the United States and its allies. Subsequently, the GRU hackers leveraged the Moobot malware to deploy their own custom malicious tools, effectively repurposing the botnet into a cyber espionage tool with global reach.
Chinese state-backed hackers broke into a computer network that's used by the Dutch armed forces by targeting Fortinet FortiGate devices. "This [computer network] was used for unclassified...
A Chinese cyber-espionage group breached the Dutch Ministry of Defence last year and deployed malware on compromised devices, according to the Military Intelligence and Security Service of the Netherlands. During the follow-up investigation, a previously unknown malware strain named Coathanger, a remote access trojan designed to infect Fortigate network security appliances, was also discovered on the breached network.
Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team is warning of a new phishing campaign that allowed Russia-linked hackers to deploy previously unseen malware on a network in under one hour. The links redirect victims to malicious web resources that employ JavaScript to drop a Windows shortcut file that launches PowerShell commands to trigger an infection chain for a new Python malware downloader called 'MASEPIE.'.
The Ukrainian government's military intelligence service says it hacked the Russian Federal Taxation Service, wiping the agency's database and backup copies. Following this operation, carried out by cyber units within Ukraine's Defense Intelligence, military intelligence officers breached Russia's federal taxation service central servers and 2,300 regional servers across Russia and occupied Ukrainian territories.
Russian APT28 military hackers used Microsoft Outlook zero-day exploits to target multiple European NATO member countries, including a NATO Rapid Deployable Corps. The Russian hackers are also tracked as Fighting Ursa, Fancy Bear, and Sofacy, and they've been previously linked to Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate, the country's military intelligence service.
A Belgian man has been arrested and charged for his role in a years-long smuggling scheme to export military-grade electronics from the US to Russia and China. Belgian law enforcement detained Hans Maria De Geetere, 61, and five others for questioning on December 5.
Professors at the University of South Australia and Charles Sturt University have developed an algorithm to detect and intercept man-in-the-middle attacks on unmanned military robots. MitM attacks are a type of cyberattack where the data traffic between two parties, in this case, the robot and its legitimate controllers, is intercepted either to eavesdrop or to inject false data in the stream.
A US Navy service member pleaded guilty yesterday to receiving thousands of dollars in bribes from a Chinese spymaster in exchange for passing on American military secrets. Petty Officer Wenheng Zhao, 26, aka Thomas Zhao, of Monterey Park, California, now faces up to 20 years in prison for two federal felony offenses: conspiring with a People's Republic of China intelligence officer, and receiving a bribe.
In this Help Net Security interview, James Murphy, the Director of the TechVets Programme at the Forces Employment Charity, discusses the challenges that military veterans face when transitioning from military to civilian life. We often find that many businesses are in high demand of cybersecurity skills, but additionally lack the soft skills that many from a military background can offer.