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Know-your-customers (KYC) policies aim to minimize the risk of money laundering, bribery, and other types of fraud. While it was originally implemented in financial institutions, companies outside the financial sector have adapted KYC with digital transactions as the primary driver. These days, the approach is enforced by virtual asset dealers, nonprofit organizations, and even social media companies.
The U.S. Capitol riot on 6 January 2021 was an unexpected event following the 2020 U.S. elections. The incident also made headlines worldwide, prompting us to track the registration trend for Trump-related domains and subdomains. We also looked into two domains for Trump's e-commerce stores that Shopify shut down.
Blind Eagle is a South American threat actor group believed to be behind APT-C-36 and that has been active since at least 2018. It primarily targets Colombian government institutions and large corporations in the financial, petroleum, and professional manufacturing industries.
The SolarWinds hack affected several government agencies and tech companies in the U.S. and worldwide. The sophisticated malware attack is believed to have compromised the trusted IT management software as early as March 2020 but only came to light in December.
Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) and intrusion prevention systems (IPSs), collectively called "intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPSs)," monitor network traffic to stave off unauthorized access. Roughly speaking, an IDS detects possible malicious network activities, while an IPS stops malicious traffic from entering and possibly damaging a network.
Why go after individuals when you can get greater rewards by zooming in on more lucrative targets like large multinational corporations (MNCs)? That's the premise behind the Cosmic Lynx business email compromise (BEC) campaign that brought several MNCs, many of which were Fortune 500 or Global 2000 companies, to their knees.
In October, Brian Krebs reported that several websites related to 8Chan and QAnon went offline, albeit only briefly. That happened when the entity protecting them from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, CNServers LLC, terminated its service to hundreds of Spartan Host IP addresses...
More recently, phishers used a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) look-alike domain in an attempt to breach several of its members' networks. Tasked to oversee 624,000 brokers in the U.S., attacking FINRA's clientele could yield a hefty sum should phishing email recipients fall for the ruse.
Charming Kitten is a cybercriminal group believed to be of Iranian origin, which was first seen in 2014, but had been active for years after the initial detection. The group use an intricate web of methods such as spear phishing and impersonation.
Cyber espionage is a type of cyber attack that aims to steal sensitive and often classified information to gain an advantage over a company or government. The 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) revealed that several hundreds of incidents across industries in the previous year were motivated by espionage.