CyberSecurity Updates

After the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday released a recovery script for organizations affected by a massive ransomware attack targeting VMWare ESXi servers worldwide, reports surfaced that the malware evolved in a way that made earlier recovery procedures ineffective. The attacks, aimed at VMware’s ESXi bare metal hypervisor, were first made public February 3 by the French Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-FR), and target ESXi instances running older versions…

A UK/US campaign to tackle international cybercrime has seen Seven Russian cybercriminals linked to a notorious ransomware group exposed and sanctioned. The sanctions were announced today by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) alongside the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). This follows a lengthy investigation by the National Crime Agency (NCA) into the crime group behind Trickbot malware, as well as the Conti and RYUK ransomware strains,…

Trustwave SpiderLabs researchers have cited an increased prevalence of HTML smuggling activity whereby cybercriminal groups abuse the versatility of HTML in combination with social engineering to distribute malware. The firm has detailed four recent HTML smuggling campaigns attempting to lure users into saving and opening malicious payloads, impersonating well-known brands such as Adobe Acrobat, Google Drive, and the US Postal Service to increase the chances of users falling victim. HTML smuggling uses HTML5 attributes that…

Security teams are comprised primarily of operations, compliance, and policy-related roles. Security engineering teams, on the other hand, are builders. They build services, automate processes, and streamline deployments to support the core security team and its stakeholders. Security engineering teams are typically made up of software and infrastructure engineers, architects, and product managers. The collective security/security engineering team mindset is also that of a builder, quite different from that of a penetration tester or third-party…

The recent kerfuffle surrounding the Chinese surveillance balloon that sailed above Canada and the United States before meeting its demise off the southeastern coast of the United States has tongues wagging and heads scratching in equal measure. While some may write this off as geopolitical shenanigans by China and nothing to fret about, I submit that it is emblematic of a nation-state using all resources available to acquire pieces of information and fill in the…

Researchers warn that a new threat actor has been targeting over a thousand organizations since October with the goal of deploying credential-stealing malware. The attack chain also involves reconnaissance components including a Trojan that takes screenshots of the desktops of infected computers. Tracked as TA866 by researchers from security firm Proofpoint, the group’s tooling seems to have similarities to other campaigns reported in the past under different names going as far back as 2019. Even…