Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, has long had a reputation as one of the world's most aggressive practitioners of sabotage, assassination, and cyber warfare, with hackers who take pride in working under the same banner as violent special forces operators. But one new group within that agency shows how …
Read More »Powerful Spyware Exploits Enable a New String of ‘Watering Hole’ Attacks
In recent years, elite commercial spyware vendors like Intellexa and NSO Group have developed an array of powerful hacking tools that exploit rare and unpatched “zero-day” software vulnerabilities to compromise victim devices. And increasingly, governments around the world have emerged as the prime customers for these tools, compromising the smartphones …
Read More »Notorious Iranian Hackers Have Been Targeting the Space Industry With a New Backdoor
The Iranian government-backed hacking group known as APT 33 has been active for more than 10 years, conducting aggressive espionage operations against a diverse array of public and private sector victims around the world, including critical infrastructure targets. And while the group is particularly known for strategic but technically simple …
Read More »Google Has Unleashed Its Legal Fury on Hackers and Scammers
About three years ago, some of Google’s security engineers came to company attorneys with a gigantic mess. The security team had discovered that Google unwittingly was enabling the spread of malicious software known as Glupteba. The malware had corrupted more than 1 million Windows computers, turning them into vehicles to …
Read More »Computer Crash Reports Are an Untapped Hacker Gold Mine
When a bad software update from the security firm CrowdStrike inadvertently caused digital chaos around the world last month, the first signs were Windows computers showing the Blue Screen of Death. As websites and services went down and people scrambled to understand what was happening, conflicting and inaccurate information was …
Read More »A New Plan to Break the Cycle of Destructive Critical Infrastructure Hacks
An endless parade of data breaches, brutally disruptive ransomware attacks, and crippling IT outages has somehow become the norm around the world. And in spite of escalating impacts to critical infrastructure and daily life, progress has been intermittent and often fleeting. Something's gotta give—and at the BSides Las Vegas security …
Read More »How Infostealers Pillaged the World’s Passwords
For the past two months, cybercriminals have advertised for sale hundreds of millions of customer records from major companies like Ticketmaster, Santander Bank, and AT&T. And while massive data breaches have been a fact of life for more than a decade now, these recent examples are significant, because they are …
Read More »A Hacker ‘Ghost’ Network Is Quietly Spreading Malware on GitHub
A secretive network of around 3,000 “ghost” accounts on GitHub has quietly been manipulating pages on the code-hosting website to promote malware and phishing links, according to new research seen by WIRED. Since at least June last year, according to researchers at cybersecurity company Check Point, a cybercriminal they dubbed …
Read More »How Russia-Linked Malware Cut Heat to 600 Ukrainian Buildings in Deep Winter
As Russia has tested every form of attack on Ukraine's civilians over the past decade, both digital and physical, it's often used winter as one of its weapons—launching cyberattacks on electric utilities to trigger December blackouts and ruthlessly bombing heating infrastructure. Now it appears Russia-based hackers last January tried yet …
Read More »Don’t Fall for CrowdStrike Outage Scams
The security firm CrowdStrike inadvertently caused mayhem around the world on Friday after deploying a faulty software update to the company's Falcon monitoring platform that bricked Windows computers running the product. Fallout from the incident will take days to resolve, and the company is warning that, as system administrators and …
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