Security News
Mandiant is "Highly confident" that foreign cyberspies will target US election infrastructure, organizations, and individuals in the run-up to the November midterm elections. "We have tracked activity from groups associated with Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and other nations targeting organizations and individuals related to elections in the US and/or other nations with apparent goals ranging from information collection and establishing footholds or stealing data for later activity to one known case of a destructive attack against critical election infrastructure," the Mandiant team said in research published today.
With the help of blockchain analysts and FBI agents, the U.S. government seized $30 million worth of cryptocurrency stolen by the North Korean threat group 'Lazarus' from the token-based 'play-to-earn' game Axie Infinity earlier in the year. "Chainalysis Crypto Incident Response team played a role in these seizures, utilizing advanced tracing techniques to follow stolen funds to cash out points and liaising with law enforcement and industry players to quickly freeze funds," the company reports.
The Vice Society threat group is ramping up ransomware attacks on US school districts just as students around the country return to the classroom, the FBI and other federal agencies are warning. The FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, and Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center said in a joint advisory this week that the Vice Society, which first appeared in the summer of 2021, recently began to disproportionately target the US education sector with ransomware attacks and they expect such attacks to increase as the school year rolls on.
China has accused the United States of a savage cyber-attack on a university famed for conducting aerospace research and linked to China's military. The National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre made its accusation on September 5th, claiming that the Office of Tailored Access Operation at the USA's National Security Agency has unleashed over 10,000 attacks in China, some using zero-day exploits, and lifted 140GB of "High value data".
An international law enforcement operation has seized the website and domains for WT1SHOP, a criminal marketplace that sold stolen credit cards, I.D. cards, and millions of login credentials. WT1SHOP was one of the largest criminal marketplaces of PII data commonly used by threat actors to buy credentials for account takeovers, credit cards used for online purchases, and government I.D. cards for identity theft.
Cybercriminals hit the Los Angeles Unified School District over the holiday weekend with a ransomware attack that temporarily shut down email, computer systems, and applications. Federal agencies including the FBI and CISA are working on-site to assist the US's second-largest public school district in its response.
Google and its YouTube subsidiary have joined other social media networks pledging to keep the 2022 US midterm elections safe and free from Russian trolls - and anyone else spewing democracy-damaging disinformation - by taking down such content. The election strategies follow Google's move to ban MAGA message-board Truth Social from its Play store until the app removes content that incites violence.
US mobile carriers know a lot about where their customers are located, and according to letters sent to the Federal Communications Commission, they routinely store such data for years, willingly hand it over to law enforcement if served a proper subpoena, and say users can't opt out. News that cellular carriers are storing sensitive location data isn't surprising given previous actions taken against AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile US and Sprint by the FCC in 2020 for selling location data to third parties.
To find out how current CISOs landed in that role, their aspirations, the compensation they receive, and which risks they face and responsibilities they shoulder, analysts with international executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles have asked 327 CISOs to participate in their 2022 Global CISO Survey. Who reports to CISOs and to whom do the CISOs report?
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced today that it filed a lawsuit against Idaho-based data broker Kochava for selling sensitive and precise geolocation data collected from hundreds of millions of mobile devices. The company provides access to consumers' location data through a data feed its clients can access via online data marketplaces after paying for a $25,000 subscription.