Cybersecurity

FBI Pushing Enforcement Action Against Money Mules

Brian Krebs reporting on the Krebs on Security blog: "The FBI's top anti-cyber crime official today said the agency is planning a law enforcement action against so-called 'money mules,' individuals willingly or unwittingly roped into helping organized computer crooks launder money stolen through online banking fraud." more

APWG: The Internet Has Never Been More Dangerous

Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) released its latest Phishing Activity Trends Report today warning that the number of unique phishing websites detected in June rose to 49,084, the highest since April, 2007's record of 55,643, and the second-highest recorded since APWG began reporting this measurement. "The number of hijacked brands ascended to an all-time high of 310 in March and remained, in historical context, at an elevated level to the close of the half in June," says the report. more

Dish Network Confirms Network Outage Was a Cybersecurity Breach Impacting Customers and Employees

The satellite television provider, Dish Network is currently dealing with a cybersecurity incident that has affected its internal networks, customer support systems, and websites such as boostinfinite.com and dish.com. It is currently investigating the incident and has confirmed certain data was extracted from its IT systems as a result. more

Global Cyberattack Hits Several US Federal Agencies

Multiple US federal agencies are grappling with a global cyberattack exploiting a flaw in the widely-used MOVEit software. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is working closely with the affected agencies to understand the impact and expedite remediation efforts. more

Security Against Election Hacking - Part 2: Cyberoffense Is Not the Best Cyberdefense!

State and county election officials across the country employ thousands of computers in election administration, most of them are connected (from time to time) to the internet (or exchange data cartridges with machines that are connected). In my previous post I explained how we must audit elections independently of the computers, so we can trust the results even if the computers are hacked. more

Recursive DNS and You

In the world of DNS, there are two types of DNS servers, 'recursion disabled' and 'recursion enabled'. Recursion disabled servers, when asked to resolve a name, will only answer for names that they are authoritative for. It will absolutely refuse to look up a name it does not have authority over and is ideal for when you don't want it to serve just any query. It isn't, however, very useful for domains you don't know about or have authority over... more

Cameras, DVRs Used for Massive Cyberattack on French Hosting Company and Others

"Hackers infect army of cameras, dvrs for massive internet attacks," reports Drew Fitzgerald in the Wall Street Journal. more

U.S. Slammed as Major Host for Cybercrime

While Russia and Ukraine are generally regarded as today's main cybercrime hubs, "a lot of their infrastructure is housed in the west, in the United States to be precise," writes Vincent Hanna of Spamhaus Project. "Without exception, all of the major security organizations on the Internet we know of agree that the 'Home' of cybercrime in the western world is a place known as Atrivo/Intercage. We ourselves have not come to this conclusion lightly but from many years of dealing with criminal operations hosted by Atrivo/Intercage, gangs of cybercriminals -- mostly Russian and East European but with several US online crime gangs as well -- whose activities always lead back to servers run by Atrivo/Intercage..." more

Internet Domain Shutdowns: Ineffective and Risky, Experts Warn

Efforts to curb illegal online content through domain shutdowns are proving ineffective and carry significant risks, according to a new report by eco and its topDNS initiative. more

Can Zero Trust Security Put an End to Human Security Weaknesses?

How bad is the human security weakness problem? Verizon's 2022 Data Breaches Investigations Report says 82 percent of data breaches have human involvement. This involvement can mean misconfigurations, poor security policy implementation, negligence, and falling prey to social engineering schemes. Essentially, a vast majority of data breaches have penetrated cyber defenses because of human carelessness, inconsistencies, and gullibility. more

Security Researchers Uncover Cyber Espionage Network Invloving 103 Countries

A report released over the weekend by Information Warfare Monitor along with an exclusive story by the New York Times, revealed a 10-month investigation of a suspected cyber espionage network (dubbed GhostNet) of over 1,295 infected computers in 103 countries. 30% of the infected computers are labeled as high-value targets, including ministries of foreign affairs, embassies, international organizations, news media, and NGOs. Greg Walton, editor of Information Warfare Monitor and a member of the Toronto academic research team that is reporting on the spying operation, writes... more

Microsoft Data Suggests 1 Out of Every 14 Downloads is Malware

Microsoft Program Manager, Jeb Haber, reports in a blog post that from browser data collected on user downloads, 1 out of every 14 programs downloaded is later confirmed as malware. Haber says: "Consumers need information to make better decisions. That said, IE9 adds another layer of defense against socially engineered attacks that now looks at the application being downloaded -- this is in addition to the URL-based protection described above. This new layer of protection is called SmartScreen Application Reputation." more

Schneier: “Someone Is Learning How to Take down the Internet”

"Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet," wrote renowned security expert, Bruce Schneier, in a piece published in Lawfare. more

Researchers Expose Over 320 Million Hashed Passwords

A group of security researchers have succeeeded in cracking over 320 million passwords which were made public in an encrypted blacklist. more

Code Released by ‘Shadow Brokers’ Raises Alarming Concerns on Whether NSA Was Hacked

The release on websites this week of what appears to be top-secret computer code that the National Security Agency has used to break into the networks of foreign governments and other espionage targets has caused deep concern inside American intelligence agencies, raising the question of whether America's own elite operatives have been hacked and their methods revealed. more