Microsoft is warning Azure cloud users that a Chinese controlled botnet is engaging in “highly evasive” password spraying. Not sure about the “highly evasive” part; the techniques seem basically what you get in a distributed password-guessing attack: “Any threat actor using the CovertNetwork-1658 infrastructure could conduct password spraying campaigns …
Really interesting story of Sophos’s five-year war against Chinese hackers. [...]
The headline is pretty scary: “ China’s Quantum Computer Scientists Crack Military-Grade Encryption.” No, it’s not true. This debunking saved me the trouble of writing one. It all seems to have come from this news article, which wasn’t bad but was taken widely out of proportion. Cryptography …
An Australian news agency is reporting that robot vacuum cleaners from the Chinese company Deebot are surreptitiously taking photos and recording audio, and sending that data back to the vendor to train their AIs. Ecovacs’s privacy policy— available elsewhere in the app —allows for blanket collection of user …
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers (Salt Typhoon) penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law—CALEA—since 1994. It’s a weird story …
The FBI has shut down a botnet run by Chinese hackers: The botnet malware infected a number of different types of internet-connected devices around the world, including home routers, cameras, digital video recorders, and NAS drives. Those devices were used to help infiltrate sensitive networks related to universities, government …
Defence secretary to address MPs after names and bank details of armed forces members targeted by unnamed attacker The Ministry of Defence has suffered a significant data breach and the personal information of UK military personnel has been hacked. A third-party payroll system used by the MoD, which includes …
Defence secretary to address MPs after names and bank details of armed forces members targeted by unnamed attacker The Ministry of Defence has suffered a significant data breach and the personal information of UK military personnel has been hacked. A third-party payroll system used by the MoD, which includes …
US Cyber Safety Review Board released a report on the summer 2023 hack of Microsoft Exchange by China. It was a serious attack by the Chinese government that accessed the emails of senior U.S. government officials. From the executive summary: The Board finds that this intrusion was preventable …
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) A federal Cyber Safety Review Board has issued its report on what led to last summer's capture of hundreds of thousands of emails by Chinese hackers from cloud customers, including federal agencies. It cites "a cascade of security failures at Microsoft" and finds that "Microsoft's …
Last week, someone posted something like 570 files, images and chat logs from a Chinese company called I-Soon. I-Soon sells hacking and espionage services to Chinese national and local government. Lots of details in the news articles. These aren’t details about the tools or techniques, more the inner …
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) More than 1,000 Ubiquiti routers in homes and small businesses were infected with malware used by Russian-backed agents to coordinate them into a botnet for crime and spy operations, according to the Justice Department. That malware, which worked as a botnet for the Russian …
TikTok seems to be skewing things in the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. (This is a serious analysis, and the methodology looks sound.) Conclusion: Substantial Differences in Hashtag Ratios Raise Concerns about TikTok’s Impartiality Given the research above, we assess a strong possibility that content on TikTok …
Enlarge (credit: Wired staff; Getty Images) For state-sponsored hacking operations, unpatched vulnerabilities are valuable ammunition. Intelligence agencies and militaries seize on hackable bugs when they're revealed—exploiting them to carry out their campaigns of espionage or cyberwar—or spend millions to dig up new ones or to buy them …
The NSA discovered the intrusion in 2020—we don’t know how—and alerted the Japanese. The Washington Post has the story : The hackers had deep, persistent access and appeared to be after anything they could get their hands on—plans, capabilities, assessments of military shortcomings, according to three …
A bunch of networks, including US Government networks, have been hacked by the Chinese. The hackers used forged authentication tokens to access user email, using a stolen Microsoft Azure account consumer signing key. Congress wants answers. The phrase “ negligent security practices ” is being tossed about—and with good reason …
Enlarge (credit: Steve McDowell / Agefotostock ) Hacking teams working for the Chinese government are intent on burrowing into the farthest reaches of sensitive infrastructure, much of it belonging to the US, and establishing permanent presences there if possible. In the past two years, they have scored some wins that could …
Everyone is writing about an interagency and international report on Chinese hacking of US critical infrastructure. Lots of interesting details about how the group, called Volt Typhoon, accesses target networks and evades detection. [...]
A Peruvian oversight law has the opposite effect: Peru in 2020 began requiring any foreign fishing boat entering its ports to use a vessel monitoring system allowing its activities to be tracked in real time 24 hours a day. The equipment, which tracks a vessel’s geographic position and …
With government concerns over national security growing, Beijing’s influence over platforms such as WeChat and Shein could come under scrutiny As TikTok, the world’s most popular app, comes under increasing scrutiny in response to data privacy and security concerns, lawmakers in the west may soon set their …
France has banned not only TikTok from government phones, but Facebook and Twitter, too. Could this be a tipping point for big tech? Plus, AI-generated pictures of the pope signal a new type of viral image Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full …
Fears for data security lie behind recent government bans on the Chinese-owned app, but zombie scrolling has health dangers too As of this moment, government officials in 11 countries are forbidden to run TikTok on their government-issued phones. The countries include the US, Canada, Denmark, Belgium, the UK, New …
Move by Greater London authority comes after Chinese-owned app was blocked on UK parliamentary devices London City Hall staff will no longer have TikTok on their devices in the latest ban imposed on the Chinese-owned social media app over security concerns. The Greater London authority (GLA) said the rule …
Move follows UK government’s decision to ban Chinese-owned video-sharing app Politics live - latest updates Parliament is to ban the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from “all parliamentary devices and the wider parliamentary network”, citing the need for cybersecurity. The move goes further than the ban last week of the …
Move comes after UK government bans app on government devices over fears of data being accessed by Chinese state The BBC has urged its staff to delete the Chinese-own social media app TikTok from corporate mobile phones. Guidance to BBC staff circulated on Sunday said: “We don’t recommend …