CyberSecure Specialist

28 Nov

Black Reward Claims Attack on Iranian Fars News Agency

Attacks, Malware

The threat group Black Reward has taken credit for the breach of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) managed Fars News Agency out of Iran. The group stated that they deleted nearly 250 terabytes of data and accessed confidential bulletins and directives sent by the news agency to the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Additional compromised data includes recorded calls, information on internal portals related to administrative conversations and news folders, image archives, and financial…

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28 Nov

U.S. Bans Sales of Huawei, Hikvision, ZTE, and Dahua Equipment

Attacks, Malware

This is not the first time the U.S. government has been at odds with Chinese telecommunications companies. In February of 2020, after an FBI investigation, Huawei was charged with racketeering conspiracy and with conspiracy to steal trade secrets. Additionally, in 2019, a U.S. affiliate of Huawei was indicted for theft of trade secrets, wire fraud, and obstruction of justice. Earlier this year, in an address to business leaders from across the U.S., FBI director Christopher…

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28 Nov

Virginia County Confirms Personal Information Stolen in Ransomware Attack

Information, News

Southampton County in Virginia last week started informing individuals that their personal information might have been compromised in a ransomware attack. The incident was identified in September, when a threat actor accessed a server at Southampton and encrypted the data that was stored on it. The county says that it took steps to contain the attack immediately after identifying it, and that it launched an investigation into the incident, to determine the type of data…

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28 Nov

AWS releases Wickr, its encrypted messaging service for enterprises

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

Just days after announcing the close of its consumer-oriented Wickr Me encrypted messaging service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), at its annual re:Invent conference on Monday, said that it was making the enterprise version of the app generally available. Dubbed simply AWS Wickr, the service was first announced in July and has been in preview till now. The enterprise version of the messaging service, designed to allow enterprise users to securely collaborate via text, voice and…

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28 Nov

Website offering spoofing services taken offline after joint operation

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

Judicial and law enforcement authorities in Europe, Australia, the US, Ukraine, and Canada took down a so-called spoofing website that allowed fraudsters to impersonate trusted corporations or contacts in order to steal more than $120 million from victims. In a coordinated action led by the UK and supported by Europol and EU judicial cooperation agency Eurojust, a total of 142 suspects were arrested, including the main administrator of the website, according to a statement posted…

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28 Nov

EU Council adopts NIS2 directive to harmonize cybersecurity across member states

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

The Council of the European Union (EU) has adopted a new cybersecurity directive designed to improve resilience and incident response capacities across the EU, replacing NIS, the current directive on the security of network and information systems. The new directive, NIS2, will set the baseline for cybersecurity risk management measures and reporting obligations across sectors and aims to harmonize cybersecurity requirements and implementation of measures in different member states. NIS2 enhances EU incident management cooperation…

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28 Nov

500 million WhatsApp mobile numbers up for sale on the dark web

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

A database of 487 million WhatsApp users’ mobile numbers has been put up for sale on the Breached.vc hacking community forum. The data set contains information on WhatsApp users from more than 84 countries, the post shows. The story was first reported by Cybernews. The seller of the leaked data is also offering it through the controversial messaging app Telegram, where the person or the group goes by handle “Palm Yunn.” On the hacking community forum,…

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28 Nov

Hacker attempts to sell data of 500m WhatsApp users on dark web

Attacks, Data Breaches

A hacker has allegedly posted a dataset to the dark web containing the personal information of almost 500 million WhatsApp users. In the post, which was uploaded to hacking forum BreachForums on November 16, the hacker claimed to be selling up-to-date personal information of 487 million WhatsApp users from 84 countries. In the post, the alleged hacker said those who bought the datasets would recieve “very recent mobile numbers” of WhatsApp users. The leak was…

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28 Nov

Here is why you should have Cobalt Strike detection in place

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

Google recently released a list of YARA detection rules for malicious variants of the legitimate Cobalt Strike penetration testing framework that are being used by hackers in the wild. Cobalt Strike is a commercial attack framework designed for red teams that has also been adopted by many threat actors, from APT groups to ransomware gangs and other cybercriminals. Living off the land is a common tactic The abuse by attackers of system administration, forensic, or…

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28 Nov

Top 7 CIAM tools

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

Customer identity and access management (CIAM), a subset of identity access management (IAM), is used to manage authentication and authorization of account creation and login process for public facing applications. To helps organizations compare their needs against the options in the market, CSO prepared a list with the top seven vendors in the market. To decide for the right CIAM product, organizations must balance the ease of the login experience with a kaleidoscope of business…

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