Pages with tag Cyber Security

A Technologists Deep Dive into indictment detailing Russia's Hacking of the 2016 USA elections Since the 2016 USA elections evidence is piling up that Russia's Intelligence services attacked the election process with an attempt to derail Hillary Clinton's candidacy. Evidence is piling up in other countries about similar cybersecurity attacks by Russia against other elections. On Friday, the special prosecutors office investigating the USA election hacking (Robert Meuller's team) released an indictment laying out the Russian Intelligence service officers involved, and more importantly the technology and techniques being used. In part this story is about misapplying technology in order to create more chaos and confusion in the world.
Cyber-attack intrusion into energy infrastructure causes 2-day outage The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced today it had recently worked on a cybersecurity threat to the operational network of a natural gas compression facility. Such facilities compress natural gas, and presumably the CISA is referring to a facility that prepares CNG for sale to other countries. The cyber-attack caused a couple days of outage, and the facility lost revenue for those two days. While there was no immediate threat -- the attacker had access to the control system, and instead of leaving behind a ransomware attack could have caused damage to systems.
Example phishing attempt - bogus try at grabbing $10,000 in BTC In the interest of exposing scammers let me share a phishing attempt I just recieved. The email includes a lot of technological-sounding phrases that are a threat to reveal compromising information. The supposed kompromat would be deleted if one sent some BTC to a named address, otherwise it'll be shared to all my friends.
Guccifer 2.0 and fake Romania connections to Russia hacking 2016 USA elections Last Friday (July 13, 2018), the Meuller team issued an indictment of a handfull of Russian GRU agents who are claimed to have hacked the DNC and DCCC servers, then distributed stolen information in an attempt to discredit the Hillary Clinton campaign. Or maybe the goal was to have Donald Trump elected President, which did happen. In any case a big figure in the story is Guccifer 2.0, who purported to be a Romanian hacker, but the Meuller team claims was actually Russian agents. This seems like an interesting angle to explore a bit.
Hidden Cobra - North Korea's DDoS Botnet infrastructure

The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have jointly announced detection of a "BOTNET" operated by "cyber actors" of the North Korean government. They are targeting the media, aerospace, financial, and critical infrastructure sectors. They've identified IP addresses associated with a distributed malware system called DeltaCharlie, that manages North Korea’s distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet infrastructure.

The HIDDEN COBRA group primarily targets computers running older, unsupported, versions of Microsoft Windows. They also target Adobe's Flash Player. The vulnerabilities exploited are known, so the simple cure is to update your system to later versions of Windows or to apply security patches.