Security News
Swiss tech multinational and U.S. government contractor ABB has confirmed that some of its systems were impacted by a ransomware attack, previously described by the company as "An IT security incident.""ABB has determined that an unauthorized third-party accessed certain ABB systems, deployed a type of ransomware that is not self-propagating, and exfiltrated certain data," the company said in a press release.
The National Security Agency and Five Eyes partner agencies have identified indicators of compromise associated with a People's Republic of China state-sponsored cyber actor dubbed Volt Typhoon, which is using living off the land techniques to target networks across US critical infrastructure. The authoring agencies also includes a summary of indicators of compromise values, such as unique command-line strings, hashes, file paths, exploitation of CVE-2021-40539 and CVE-2021-27860 vulnerabilities, and file names commonly used by this actor.
China has attacked critical infrastructure organizations in the US using a "Living off the land" attack that hides offensive action among everyday Windows admin activity. The attack was spotted by Microsoft and acknowledged by intelligence and infosec agencies from the Five Eyes nations - Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. A joint cyber security advisory [PDF] from ten agencies describes "a recently discovered cluster of activity of interest associated with a People's Republic of China state-sponsored cyber actor, also known as Volt Typhoon."
Microsoft says a Chinese cyberespionage group it tracks as Volt Typhoon has been targeting critical infrastructure organizations across the United States, including Guam, since at least mid-2021. "Microsoft assesses with moderate confidence that this Volt Typhoon campaign is pursuing development of capabilities that could disrupt critical communications infrastructure between the United States and Asia region during future crises," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said.
Their prospects of picking up your work have receded further, after the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control made it illegal to do business with one: Chinyong Information Technology Cooperation Company, aka Jinyong IT Cooperation Company. Treasury asserted the outsourcer "Employs delegations of DPRK IT workers that operate in Russia and Laos.".
The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control announced sanctions today against four entities and one individual for their involvement in illicit IT worker schemes and cyberattacks generating revenue to finance North Korea's weapons development programs. North Korea's illicit revenue generation strategy relies heavily on a massive "Army" of thousands of IT workers who hide their identities to get hired by companies overseas, the OFAC said in a press release published on Tuesday.
The Irish Data Protection Commission has announced a $1.3 billion fine on Facebook after claiming that the company violated Article 46(1) of the GDPR. More specifically, it was found that Facebook transferred data of EU-based users of the platform to the United States, where data protection regulations vary per state and have been deemed inadequate to protect the rights of EU data subjects. As a result of the infringement, the DPC imposed a record €1.2 billion fine on Facebook's parent company, Meta Ireland, and requested that all data transfers that violate the GDPR be suspended within five months of the decision.
Babuk therefore serves as a sort-of instruction manual that teaches would-be cybercrimals how to handle the "We can decrypt this but you can't, so pay us the blackmail money or you'll never see your data again" part of a ransomware attack. The US indictment explicitly accuses Matveev of two ransomware attacks in the State of New Jersey, and one in the District of Columbia.
TRANServe - an electronic travel pass system managed by DoT, and used by many employees across the federal government to encourage use of public transport - told Congress it made a mistake in protecting that data.The DoT told The Register its CIO office "Isolated the breach to certain systems at the department used for administrative functions, such as employee transit benefits processing," adding that the incident did not affect any transportation safety systems.
TRANServe - an electronic travel pass system managed by DoT, and used by many employees across the federal government to encourage use of public transport - told Congress it made a mistake in protecting that data. The DoT told The Register its CIO office "Isolated the breach to certain systems at the department used for administrative functions, such as employee transit benefits processing," adding that the incident did not affect any transportation safety systems.