Security News
The boss of US Cyber Command has opined that China's cyber and surveillance capabilities are not ahead of, or even comparable to, to those of the United States. "There is a scope-scale sophistication that we ascribe to what China is doing today. Are they getting better? Yes," the commander of US Cyber Command, general Paul Nakasone, told a Thursday event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
The head of both US Cyber Command and the NSA, Gen. Paul Nakasone, broadly discussed that first organization's offensive cyber operations during the runup to the 2022 midterm elections. "We did conduct operations persistently to make sure that our foreign adversaries couldn't utilize infrastructure to impact us," said Nakasone.
US Cyber Command has disclosed 20 new strains of malware among the numerous software nasties and cyberattacks being used against Ukrainian targets over the last few months. In an alert this week, the Pentagon's cyberspace wing made public indicators of compromise associated with various malware strains that were found in Ukrainian networks by the country's security service.
US Cyber Command chief General Paul Nakasone said has revealed the agency he leads conducted nine "Hunt forward" operations last year, sending teams to different counties to help them improve their defensive security posture and hunt for cyberthreats. These missions provide "Security for our nation in cyberspace," said Nakasone, who is also director of the National Security Agency, during a Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats at Vanderbilt University.
The U.S. Cyber Command on Wednesday officially confirmed MuddyWater's ties to the Iranian intelligence apparatus, while simultaneously detailing the various tools and tactics adopted by the espionage actor to burrow into victim networks. "MuddyWater has been seen using a variety of techniques to maintain access to victim networks," USCYBERCOM's Cyber National Mission Force said in a statement.
The Jenkins team issued a reminder over the weekend that one should keep one's systems patched as it found itself with a compromised Confluence service. Although the affected instance of Confluence integrated with the company's identity system, the group said: "At this time we have no reason to believe that any Jenkins releases, plugins, or source code have been affected."
If the Pentagon's Cyber Command launches an online attack and nobody knows about it, does it deter anyone? Many Americans are asking what the country's army of cyber warriors are doing after repeated attacks on US computer systems by Chinese, Russian and other hackers.
The US Cyber Command has released a series of ten Valentine’s Day “Cryptography Challenge Puzzles.” Slashdot thread. Reddit thread. (And here’s the archived link, in case Cyber Command takes the...
The United States Cyber Command warns that users should apply the latest patches for Microsoft software to ensure they won't fall victim to exploitation attempts. The most important of these issues, US Cyber Command points out, is CVE-2020-16898, a critical bug in the Windows TCP/IP stack that can be triggered remotely to potentially achieve remote code execution on the victim machine.
The new configuration file pushed on Sept. 22 told all systems infected with Trickbot that their new malware control server had the address 127.0.0.1, which is a "Localhost" address that is not reachable over the public Internet, according to an analysis by cyber intelligence firm Intel 471. U.S. Cyber Command's campaign against the Trickbot botnet, an army of at least 1 million hijacked computers run by Russian-speaking criminals, is not expected to permanently dismantle the network, said four U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity.