Security News
In brief Russian hackers have proved yet again how quickly cyber attacks can be used to respond to global events with a series of DDoS attacks on German infrastructure and government websites in response to the country's plan to send tanks to Ukraine. Germany announced the transfer of 14 Leopard 2 A6 tanks to Ukraine on Wednesday, jointly with the US saying it would send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to the besieged nation.
The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre on Thursday warned of spear-phishing attacks mounted by Russian and Iranian state-sponsored actors for information-gathering operations. The activity is typical of spear-phishing campaigns, where the threat actors send messages tailored to the targets, while also taking enough time to research their interests and identify their social and professional circles.
The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre has issued a warning of Russian and Iranian state-sponsored hackers increasingly targeting organizations and individuals. More specifically, the country's cybersecurity agency has identified a spike in spear-phishing attacks attributed to threat actors tracked as SEABORGIUM and TA453.
The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine has linked a destructive malware attack targeting the country's National News Agency of Ukraine to Sandworm Russian military hackers. "According to preliminary data, provided by CERT-UA specialists, the attack have caused certain destructive effects on the agency's information infrastructure, but the threat has been swiftly localized nonetheless," the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine said.
Groups tied to the Russian intelligence services will also continue to target geographic neighbors with disinformation campaigns, intelligence gathering, and possibly low-level disruptive attacks. Traditional espionage targets will continue to be a focus; for example, we saw evidence in August 2022 of Russian intelligence services using spear phishing emails to target staff at the Argonne and Brookhaven national laboratories in the US, which conduct cutting edge energy research.
The security shop's research team said it has already seen Russian cybercriminals on underground forums discussing OpenAI workarounds so that they can bring ChatGPT to the dark side. We'd have thought ChatGPT would be most useful for coming up with emails and other messages to send people to trick them into handing over their usernames and passwords, but what do we know? Some crooks may find the AI model helpful in offering malicious code and techniques to deploy.
People in Russia can reportedly once again download drivers and some other software from Intel and Microsoft, which both withdrew from the nation after its invasion of Ukraine. The situation, we're assured, is this: while Intel's website generally remains closed to netizens visiting from Russia, if those people can reach Intel's download portal from a search engine or some other place, they can now, once again, use that site even if they are in the land of Putin.
Russian disinformation didn't materially affect the way people voted in the 2016 US presidential election, according to a research study published on Monday, though that doesn't make the effect totally inconsequential. Boffins from New York University, University of Copenhagen, Trinity College Dublin, and Technical University of Munich analyzed more than 700,000 social media posts in April and in October 2016 from Twitter accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian influence operation.
The Russian cyberespionage group known as Turla has been observed piggybacking on attack infrastructure used by a decade-old malware to deliver its own reconnaissance and backdoor tools to targets in Ukraine. Google-owned Mandiant, which is tracking the operation under the uncategorized cluster moniker UNC4210, said the hijacked servers correspond to a variant of a commodity malware called ANDROMEDA that was uploaded to VirusTotal in 2013.
Two U.S. citizens were arrested for allegedly conspiring with Russian hackers to hack the John F. Kennedy International Airport taxi dispatch system to move specific taxis to the front of the queue in exchange for a $10 fee. The taxi dispatch system is a computer-controlled system that ensures that taxis are dispatched from the airport's holding lot to pick up the next available fare at the appropriate terminal.