Security News
On Monday, the US Department of Justice announced formal charges against two foreign nationals for their role in deploying REvil ransomware attacks against organizations throughout the country. A 22-year-old Ukrainian national named Yaroslav Vasinskyi has been charged with multiple ransomware incidents, including the July 2021 attack against IT enterprise firm Kaseya.
In a major ransomware bust US and European authorities on Monday announced separate but related indictments and arrests linked to extortionware attacks on IT service provider Kaseya and other firms. Europol said Romanian police last week arrested two individuals suspected of involvement in cyberattacks that utilized the Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware.
The US Treasury Department announced today sanctions against the Chatex cryptocurrency exchange for helping ransomware gangs evade sanctions and facilitating ransom transactions. Just as in Suex's case, by sanctioning Chatex the US administration aims to take down the main channel used by ransomware operations to collect ransom payments from their victims.
The United States Department of Justice today has announced charges against a REvil ransomware affiliate responsible for the attack against the Kaseya MSP platform on July 2nd and seizing more than $6 million from another REvil partner. He is one of the seven REvil ransomware affiliates that have been apprehended so far, in ample international efforts to combat the ransomware threat.
The US Supreme Court this week refused [PDF] to hear a case that would have forced the country's hush-hush Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to explain its justifications for giving the Feds the right to help themselves to bulk amounts of the public's data. In a blistering dissent filed on Monday [PDF], Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor asked why the court would decline to review a case with "Profound implications for Americans' privacy and their rights to speak and associate freely."
The $10 million is for intel that leads to the identification or location of anyone who holds a leadership position in the DarkSide group. Any bounty hunters out there could potentially score a cool $10 million if they help the US government snag one of the leaders of the DarkSide ransomware gang.
US defense contractor Electronic Warfare Associates has disclosed a data breach after threat actors hacked their email system and stole files containing personal information. As detailed in a notice to the Montana Attorney General's office, EWA discovered that a threat actor took over one of their email accounts on August 2, 2021.
The US government is targeting the DarkSide ransomware and its rebrands with up to a $10,000,000 reward for information leading to the identification or arrest of members of the operation. The US Department of Statement announced today that they are now offering a $10,000,000 reward for the identification or location of DarkSide ransomware members operating in key leadership positions.
NSO Group - the Israeli-based maker of the notorious, military-grade Pegasus spyware that's been linked to cyberattacks against dissidents, activists and NGOs at the hands of repressive regimes - has been blacklisted by the United States. NSO Group is one of four spyware developers or traffickers that the U.S. Commerce Department added to its "Entity List" on Wednesday, effectively banning trade with the company.
In the latest effort to combat cybercrime and ransomware, federal agencies have been told to patch hundreds of known security vulnerabilities with due dates ranging from November 2021 to May 2022. In a directive issued on Wednesday, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency ordered all federal and executive branch departments and agencies to patch a series of known exploited vulnerabilities as cataloged in a public website managed by CISA. SEE: Patch management policy.