When the activities of Russian hacker groups are exposed in a major public report and tied to a government agency—such as the Russian military's Sandworm unit, which has targeted Ukrainian electrical utilities to trigger three blackouts over the past decade, or the Russian foreign intelligence service's APT29, which is believed …
Read More »A Vast New Data Set Could Supercharge the AI Hunt for Crypto Money Laundering
One task where AI tools have proven to be particularly superhuman is analyzing vast troves of data to find patterns that humans can't see, or automating and accelerating the discovery of those we can. That makes Bitcoin's blockchain, a public record of nearly a billion transactions between pseudonymous addresses, the …
Read More »Cyberspies Hacked Cisco Firewalls to Access Government Networks
Network security appliances like firewalls are meant to keep hackers out. Instead, digital intruders are increasingly targeting them as the weak link that lets them pillage the very systems those devices are meant to protect. In the case of one hacking campaign over recent months, Cisco is now revealing that …
Read More »Change Healthcare Finally Admits It Paid Ransomware Hackers—and Still Faces a Patient Data Leak
More than two months after the start of a ransomware debacle whose impact ranks among the worst in the history of cybersecurity, the medical firm Change Healthcare finally confirmed what cybercriminals, security researchers, and Bitcoin's blockchain had already made all too clear: that it did indeed pay a $22 million …
Read More »Hackers Linked to Russia’s Military Claim Credit for Sabotaging US Water Utilities
Russia's military intelligence unit known as Sandworm has, for the past decade, served as the Kremlin’s most aggressive cyberattack force, triggering blackouts in Ukraine and releasing self-spreading, destructive code in incidents that remain some of the most disruptive hacking events in history. In recent months, however, one group of hackers …
Read More »A Vigilante Hacker Took Down North Korea’s Internet. Now He’s Taking Off His Mask
A little over two years have passed since the online vigilante who would call himself P4x fired the first shot in his own one-man cyberwar. Working alone in his coastal Florida home in late January of 2022, wearing slippers and pajama pants and periodically munching on Takis corn snacks, he …
Read More »Hackers Found a Way to Open Any of 3 Million Hotel Keycard Locks in Seconds
When thousands of security researchers descend on Las Vegas every August for what's come to be known as “hacker summer camp,” the back-to-back Black Hat and Defcon hacker conferences, it's a given that some of them will experiment with hacking the infrastructure of Vegas itself, the city's elaborate array of …
Read More »Binance’s Top Crypto Crime Investigator Is Being Detained in Nigeria
Editor's note: Nigerian authorities have charged Binance and two company executives with tax evasion. See more in the update below. In his years as a US federal agent, Tigran Gambaryan helped to lead landmark investigations that took down cryptocurrency thieves and money launderers, dark-web drug dealers, and even crypto-funded child …
Read More »Hackers Behind the Change Healthcare Ransomware Attack Just Received a $22 Million Payment
The ransomware attack targeting medical firm Change Healthcare has been one of the most disruptive in years, crippling pharmacies across the US—including those in hospitals—and leading to serious snags in the delivery of prescription drugs nationwide for 10 days and counting. Now, a dispute within the criminal underground has revealed …
Read More »The Mysterious Case of the Missing Trump Trial Ransomware Leak
This week, the notorious ransomware gang known as LockBit threatened a kind of disruption that would have been a first even for a criminal industry that has crippled hospitals and triggered the shutdown of a gas pipeline: leaking documents from the criminal prosecution of a former president and presidential candidate. …
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