Security News
Cyber attack risks faced by businesses across states and reported data breaches are relative to the respective state governments' cybersecurity investment, according to Network Assured. While expectedly, California, with its high concentration of businesses in technology and healthcare recorded the highest number of data breaches at 1,338, the relatively small state of Maryland ranked 5th worst in the nation with 343 breaches.
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.
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.
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.
The malware intermittently redirected random customer websites to malicious sites. Redirects are so common that if you hang around web developers at all, you'll hear them referring to them by their numeric HTTP codes, in much the same way that the rest of us talk about "Getting a 404" when we try to visit a page that no longer exists, simply because 404 is HTTP's Not Found error code.
Lawmakers in the European Parliament have urged the European Commission not to issue the "Adequacy decision" needed for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework to officially become the pipeline for data to freely flow from the EU to the States. European rules around privacy, data collection, and data subjects' rights are considerably stronger than those in America, hence the need for rules of engagement that make US companies' treatment of EU data as good as what they'd get at home.
A new attack campaign launched by an unknown threat actor targets the U.S. with two malware families: MortalKombat ransomware and Laplas Clipper. Figure A. Once executed, the loader downloads another ZIP file from a server belonging to the attackers' infrastructure, whose content might be MortalKombat ransomware or Laplas Clipper malware.
The US Department of Commerce added six more entities to its blacklist on Friday on grounds of national security after an errant Chinese surveillance balloon was shot down over the US last week. According to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the balloon followed a flight path, and the US did not give any credence to the Chinese argument that the balloon veered off course.
US and South Korean agencies have issued a joint cybersecurity advisory describing the tactics, techniques and procedures used by North Korean hackers to deploy "State-sponsored" ransomware on hospitals and other organizations that can be considered part of the countries' critical infrastructure. "The authoring agencies assess that an unspecified amount of revenue from these cryptocurrency operations supports DPRK national-level priorities and objectives, including cyber operations targeting the United States and South Korea governments-specific targets include Department of Defense Information Networks and Defense Industrial Base member networks," the advisory points out.
The US and UK have sanctioned seven Russians for their alleged roles in disseminating Conti and Ryuk ransomware and the Trickbot banking trojan. Conti and Ryuk ransomware extorted at least £27 million from 149 UK individuals and businesses, according to the government's estimate.