Security News
A series of distributed-denial-of-service attacks shut down nine Danish hospitals' websites for a few hours on Sunday, but did not have any life-threatening impact on the medical centers' operations or digital infrastructure. "Region H the hospitals' websites are down," it read, in Danish.
In brief A Russian national has been hit with a five-count indictment alleging he smuggled hardware and software used for counterintelligence operations out of the US to the Russian Federal Security Service and North Korea. He's being charged with conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, two counts of conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act and smuggling.
"The consequences of Russia's war against Ukraine have ushered in a new era of volatility and unpredictability for global cybercrime that carries a multitude of implications for defenders," Leslie said. Russian cybercrime, per the report, refers to a diverse group or Russian-speaking miscreants located in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia.
A Russian national accused of developing the NLBrute brute-force hacking tool has made his first court appearance this week in Florida over accusations that he used the tool to spawn a criminal empire. Dariy Pankov, also known as "Dpxaker," created the NLBrute malware that cracked the Windows credentials of improperly secured Remote Desktop Protocol systems through the brute-force technique of throwing massive numbers of password guesses at them, according to the US Department of Justice.
The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine says Russian state hackers have breached multiple government websites this week using backdoors planted as far back as December 2021. CERT-UA spotted the attacks after discovering a web shell on Thursday morning on one of the hacked websites that the threat actors used to install additional malware.
A Russian malware developer accused of creating and selling the NLBrute password-cracking tool was extradited to the United States after being arrested in the Republic of Georgia last year on October 4. "The powerful malware was capable of compromising protected computers by decrypting login credentials, such as passwords," the Justice Department said in a press release on Wednesday.
Russia's cyber attacks against Ukraine surged by 250% in 2022 when compared to two years ago, Google's Threat Analysis Group and Mandiant disclosed in a new joint report. Mandiant said it observed, "More destructive cyber attacks in Ukraine during the first four months of 2022 than in the previous eight years with attacks peaking around the start of the invasion."
A series of distributed denial-of-service attacks shut down seven German airports' websites on Thursday, a day after a major IT glitch at Lufthansa grounded flights. Ralph Beisel, the general manager of Germany's ADV airport association, confirmed the network-flooding events in an emailed statement to The Register, but did not specify which airports were hit.
Russian national Vladislav Klyushin was found guilty of participating in a global scheme that involved hacking into U.S. computer networks to steal confidential earnings reports, which helped the criminals net $90,000,000 in illegal profits. Klyushin was extradited to the U.S. in December 2021 to face charges of hacking into the systems of two U.S.-based filing agents that American companies used to file earnings reports through the Securities and Exchange Commissions system.
A US federal jury in Boston on Tuesday found Vladislav Klyushin - who owned an IT biz based in Moscow called M-13 - guilty of wire and securities fraud and conspiracy after two weeks of testimony and ten hours of deliberations. Prosecutors in the case argued that Klyushin and four others broke into the networks of Donnelley Financial Solutions and Toppan Merrill, through which publicly traded entities electronically file their quarterly earnings reports with America's financial watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission.