Security News
The Washington Post is reporting that the US is spying on the UN Secretary General. The reports on Guterres appear to contain the secretary general's personal conversations with aides regarding diplomatic encounters.
What is new is the extent to which the balloon was driven by US hardware, which unnamed sources told the Wall Street Journal was "Crammed" with off-the-shelf components that could have easily been purchased online. In February, US officials added six Chinese companies to its trade-restricting Entity List over their work with the Chinese government to develop high-altitude balloons like the one in question.
A Russian network security specialist and former editor of Hacker magazine who is wanted by the US and Russia on cybercrime charges has been detained in Kazakhstan as the two governments seek his extradition. Maybe the second part wasn't such a good idea after all - an update to the statement notes that Kislitsin is also wanted by Russia.
A new Android malware campaign has been observed pushing the Anatsa banking trojan to target banking customers in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Austria, and Switzerland since the start of March 2023. "The actors behind Anatsa aim to steal credentials used to authorize customers in mobile banking applications and perform Device-Takeover Fraud to initiate fraudulent transactions," ThreatFabric said in an analysis published Monday.
ThreatFabric discovered a previous Anatsa campaign on Google Play in November 2021, when the trojan was installed over 300,000 times by impersonating PDF scanners, QR code scanners, Adobe Illustrator apps, and fitness tracker apps. In March 2023, after a six-month hiatus in malware distribution, the threat actors launched a new malvertizing campaign that leads prospective victims to download Anatsa dropper apps from Google Play.
A 33-year-old man from Serbia has been extradited from Austria to the United States to face charges of running a criminal darknet narcotics marketplace called "Monopoly Market." According to a U.S. Department of Justice announcement, the suspect, Milomir Desnica, is charged with facilitating $18 million in illegal drug transactions through his website.
China has a playbook to use IP theft to seize leadership in cloud computing, and other nations should band together to stop that happening, according to Nathaniel C. Fick, the US ambassador-at-large for cyberspace and digital policy. The ambassador described China's actions in the telecoms industry as "a playbook" and warned the nation will "Run it in cloud computing they will run it in AI, they will run it in every core strategic technology area that matters."
The growing adoption of cloud has elevated cloud security fear for IT teams, as they grapple with the challenges and concerns arising from the widespread use of complex cloud environments while diligently addressing them, according to SUSE. Cloud security fear is growing. Data stores as top cloud security concern: 31% of respondents named data stores hosted by cloud or third parties as their top cloud security concern.
Infosec in brief Remember earlier this year, when we found out that a bunch of baddies including at least one nation-state group broke into a US federal government agency's Microsoft Internet Information Services web server by exploiting a critical three-year-old Telerik bug to achieve remote code execution? The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and FBI warned about the first intrusion into a federal civilian executive branch agency's Microsoft IIS web server back in March, and said the snafu happened between November 2022 and early January.
The U.S. State Department's Rewards for Justice program announced up to a $10 million bounty yesterday for information linking the Clop ransomware attacks to a foreign government. "Do you have info linking CL0P Ransomware Gang or any other malicious cyber actors targeting U.S. critical infrastructure to a foreign government? Send us a tip. You could be eligible for a reward," tweeted the Rewards for Justice Twitter account.