Security News

The National Cyber Security Centre picked its London HQ building not because it was the best or most cost-efficient location - but because the agency "Prioritised image over cost", a Parliamentary committee has said. NCSC's HQ in the English capital's Nova South development, a glitzy commercial building near Westminster, was procured in breach of GCHQ's own rules on leasing commercial buildings.

Switzerland benefitted from a spectacular espionage scheme orchestrated by the CIA and its German counterpart who used a Swiss encryption company to spy on governments worldwide, a parliamentary probe showed Tuesday. A large media investigation revealed back in February an elaborate, decades-long set-up, in which US and German intelligence services creamed off the top-secret communications of governments through their hidden control of the Crypto encryption company in Switzerland.

Swiss politicians only found out last year that cipher machine company Crypto AG was owned by the US and Germany during the Cold War, a striking report from its parliament has revealed. Although Swiss spies themselves knew that Crypto AG's products were being intentionally weakened so the West could read messages passing over them, they didn't tell governmental overseers until last year - barely one year after the operation ended.

The Czech Republic's intelligence agency said Tuesday Russian and Chinese spies posed an imminent threat to the EU member's security and other key interests last year. All Russian intelligence services were active on Czech territory in 2019.

The Russia-linked cyber-espionage group known as Turla was recently observed targeting a European government organization with a combination of backdoors, security researchers at Accenture reveal. In a recent attack on such an organization in Europe, Turla was observed employing a combination of remote procedure call-based backdoors, including the HyperStack backdoor, and Kazuar and Carbon remote administration Trojans.

It's said the NSA drew up a report on what it learned after a foreign government exploited a weak encryption scheme, championed by the US spying agency, in Juniper firewall software. On Wednesday, Reuters reporter Joseph Menn published an account of US Senator Ron Wyden's efforts to determine whether the NSA is still in the business of placing backdoors in US technology products.

Encryption is vital to protecting people's use of data, it says, alongside human rights activists in repressive regimes, journalists researching corruption, and all those good things. You cannot make an encryption system insecure without making it insecure.

A cyberespionage group known as BAHAMUT has been linked to a "Staggering" number of ongoing attacks against government officials and private-sector VIPs in the Middle East and South Asia, while also engaging in wide-ranging disinformation campaigns. "The group took over the domain of what was originally an information security news website and began pushing out content focused on geopolitics, research, industry news about other hack-for-hire groups," according to the report - along with news about exploit brokers like the NSO Group.

The miscreants also managed to access the Twitter Direct Messages in 36 accounts, and to download Twitter account data for seven accounts. "Increasingly we rely on platforms like Twitter to receive news and other information that is important to our lives," said US Attorney for the Northern District of California David Anderson in the video statement below.

The Kremlin-backed APT29 crew, also known by a variety of other names such as Cozy Bear, Iron Hemlock, or The Dukes, depending on which threat intel company you're talking to that week, is believed by most reputable analysts to be a wholly owned subsidiary of the FSB, modern-day successor to the infamous Soviet KGB. NCSC ops director Paul Chichester said in a statement: "We condemn these despicable attacks against those doing vital work to combat the coronavirus pandemic." Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab added: "It is completely unacceptable that the Russian Intelligence Services are targeting those working to combat the coronavirus pandemic. While others pursue their selfish interests with reckless behaviour, the UK and its allies are getting on with the hard work of finding a vaccine and protecting global health."