Insights

JCDC Cultivates Pre-Ransomware Notification Capability

In today’s blog post, Associate Director of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) Clayton Romans highlighted recent successes of pre-ransomware notification and its impact in reducing harm from ransomware intrusions. With pre-ransomware notifications, organizations can receive early warning and potentially evict threat actors before they can encrypt and hold critical data and systems for ransom. Using this proactive cyber defense capability, CISA has notified more than 60 entities of early-stage ransomware intrusions since January 2023, including…

Read More

Untitled Goose Tool Aids Hunt and Incident Response in Azure, Azure Active Directory, and Microsoft 365 Environments

Today, CISA released the Untitled Goose Tool to help network defenders detect potentially malicious activity in Microsoft Azure, Azure Active Directory (AAD), and Microsoft 365 (M365) environments. The Untitled Goose Tool offers novel authentication and data gathering methods for network defenders to use as they interrogate and analyze their Microsoft cloud services. The tool enables users to: Export and review AAD sign-in and audit logs, M365 unified audit log (UAL), Azure activity logs, Microsoft Defender…

Read More

Google Suspends Chinese E-Commerce App Pinduoduo Over Malware

Google says it has suspended the app for the Chinese e-commerce giant Pinduoduo after malware was found in versions of the software. The move comes just weeks after Chinese security researchers published an analysis suggesting the popular e-commerce app sought to seize total control over affected devices by exploiting multiple security vulnerabilities in a variety of Android-based smartphones. In November 2022, researchers at Google’s Project Zero warned about active attacks on Samsung mobile phones which…

Read More

CISA and NSA Release Enduring Security Framework Guidance on Identity and Access Management

As part of the Enduring Security Framework (ESF), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) has released Identity and Access Management Recommended Best Practices Guide for Administrators. These recommended best practices provide system administrators with actionable recommendations to better secure their systems from threats to Identity and Access Management (IAM). IAM—a framework of business processes, policies, and technologies that facilitate the management of digital identities—ensures that users only gain…

Read More

CISA Releases Updated Cybersecurity Performance Goals

Today, we published stakeholder-based updates to the Cybersecurity Performance Goals (CPGs). Originally released last October, the CPGs are voluntary practices that businesses and critical infrastructure owners can take to protect themselves against cyber threats. The CPGs have been reorganized, reordered and renumbered to align closely with NIST CSF functions (Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover) to help organizations more easily use the CPGs to prioritize investments as part of a broader cybersecurity program built around…

Read More

Why You Should Opt Out of Sharing Data With Your Mobile Provider

A new breach involving data from nine million AT&T customers is a fresh reminder that your mobile provider likely collects and shares a great deal of information about where you go and what you do with your mobile device — unless and until you affirmatively opt out of this data collection. Here’s a primer on why you might want to do that, and how. Image: Shutterstock Telecommunications giant AT&T disclosed this month that a breach…

Read More

Feds Charge NY Man as BreachForums Boss “Pompompurin”

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) this week arrested a New York man on suspicion of running BreachForums, a popular English-language cybercrime forum where some of the world biggest hacked databases routinely show up for sale. The forum’s administrator “Pompompurin” has been a thorn in the side of the FBI for years, and BreachForums is widely considered a reincarnation of RaidForums, a remarkably similar crime forum that the FBI infiltrated and dismantled in 2022.…

Read More

FBI, CISA, and MS-ISAC Release #StopRansomware: LockBit 3.0

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), CISA, and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) has released a joint cybersecurity advisory (CSA), #StopRansomware: LockBit 3.0. This joint advisory details known indicators of compromise (IOCs) and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that FBI investigations correlated with LockBit 3.0 ransomware as recently as March 2023. LockBit 3.0 functions as an affiliate-based ransomware variant and is a continuation of LockBit 2.0 and LockBit. CISA encourages network defenders…

Read More

CISA released four Industrial…

CISA released four Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on March 14, 2023. These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS. CISA encourages users and administrators to review the newly released ICS advisories for technical details and mitigations: ICSA-23-073-01 Omron CJ1m PLC ICSA-23-073-02 Autodesk FBX SDK ICSA-23-073-03 GE iFIX ICSA-23-073-04 AVEVA Plant SCADA and AVEVA Telemetry Server

Read More