ProPublica has a long investigative article on how the Cyber Safety Review Board failed to investigate the SolarWinds attack, and specifically Microsoft’s culpability, even though they were directed by President Biden to do so. [...]
This move has been coming for a long time. The Biden administration on Thursday said it’s banning the company from selling its products to new US-based customers starting on July 20, with the company only allowed to provide software updates to existing customers through September 29. The ban …
New paper: “ Zero Progress on Zero Days: How the Last Ten Years Created the Modern Spyware Market “: Abstract: Spyware makes surveillance simple. The last ten years have seen a global market emerge for ready-made software that lets governments surveil their citizens and foreign adversaries alike and to do so …
Microsoft announced that it caught Chinese, Russian, and Iranian hackers using its AI tools—presumably coding tools—to improve their hacking abilities. From their report : In collaboration with OpenAI, we are sharing threat intelligence showing detected state affiliated adversaries—tracked as Forest Blizzard, Emerald Sleet, Crimson Sandstorm, Charcoal Typhoon …
Google removed fake Signal and Telegram apps from its Play store. An app with the name Signal Plus Messenger was available on Play for nine months and had been downloaded from Play roughly 100 times before Google took it down last April after being tipped off by security firm …
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 …
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. [...]
Reuters is reporting that the FBI “had identified and disabled malware wielded by Russia’s FSB security service against an undisclosed number of American computers, a move they hoped would deal a death blow to one of Russia’s leading cyber spying programs.” The headline says that the FBI …
Now this is interesting: Thousands of pages of secret documents reveal how Vulkan’s engineers have worked for Russian military and intelligence agencies to support hacking operations, train operatives before attacks on national infrastructure, spread disinformation and control sections of the internet. The company’s work is linked to …
The New York Times is reporting that a US citizen’s phone was hacked by the Predator spyware. A U.S. and Greek national who worked on Meta’s security and trust team while based in Greece was placed under a yearlong wiretap by the Greek national intelligence service …
An ex-NSA employee has been charged with trying to sell classified data to the Russians (but instead actually talking to an undercover FBI agent). It’s a weird story, and the FBI affidavit raises more questions than it answers. The employee only worked for the NSA for three weeks …
Back in 2018, we learned that covert system of websites that the CIA used for communications was compromised by —at least—China and Iran, and that the blunder caused a bunch of arrests, imprisonments, and executions. We’re now learning that the CIA is still “using an irresponsibly secured …
Microsoft has a comprehensive report on the dozens of cyberattacks — and even more espionage operations — Russia has conducted against Ukraine as part of this war: At least six Russian Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors and other unattributed threats, have conducted destructive attacks, espionage operations, or both, while Russian military …
This will be law soon: Companies critical to U.S. national interests will now have to report when they’re hacked or they pay ransomware, according to new rules approved by Congress. [...] The reporting requirement legislation was approved by the House and the Senate on Thursday and is expected …
Amy Zegart has a new book: Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence. Wired has an excerpt : In short, data volume and accessibility are revolutionizing sensemaking. The intelligence playing field is leveling — and not in a good way. Intelligence collectors are everywhere, and government spy …
Remember when the US and Australian police surreptitiously owned and operated the encrypted cell phone app ANOM? They arrested 800 people in 2021 based on that operation. New documents received by Motherboard show that over 100 of those phones were shipped to users in the US, far more than …
NSO Group’s descent into Internet pariah status continues. Its Pegasus spyware was used against nine US State Department employees. We don’t know which NSO Group customer trained the spyware on the US. But the company does: NSO Group said in a statement on Thursday that it did …
Someone has been hacking telecommunications networks around the world: LightBasin (aka UNC1945) is an activity cluster that has been consistently targeting the telecommunications sector at a global scale since at least 2016, leveraging custom tools and an in-depth knowledge of telecommunications network architectures. Recent findings highlight this cluster’s …
Apparently, a nation-state hacked Alaska’s Department of Health and Social Services. Not sure why Alaska’s Department of Health and Social Services is of any interest to a nation-state, but that’s probably just my failure of imagination. [...]
I’m starting to see writings about a Chinese espionage tool that exploits website vulnerabilities to try and identify Chinese dissidents. [...]
NSO Group, the Israeli cyberweapons arms manufacturer behind the Pegasus spyware — used by authoritarian regimes around the world to spy on dissidents, journalists, human rights workers, and others — was hacked. Or, at least, an enormous trove of documents was leaked to journalists. There’s a lot to read out …
Citizen Lab has identified yet another Israeli company that sells spyware to governments around the world: Candiru. From the report : Summary: Candiru is a secretive Israel-based company that sells spyware exclusively to governments. Reportedly, their spyware can infect and monitor iPhones, Androids, Macs, PCs, and cloud accounts. Using Internet …
Russia’s Sunburst cyberespionage campaign, discovered late last year, impacted more than 100 large companies and US federal agencies, including the Treasury, Energy, Justice, and Homeland Security departments. A crucial part of the Russians’ success was their ability to move through these organizations by compromising cloud and local network …
On April 15, the Biden administration both formally attributed the SolarWinds espionage campaign to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and imposed a series of sanctions designed to punish the country for the attack and deter future attacks. I will leave it to those with experience in foreign relations …
In January, we learned about a Chinese espionage campaign that exploited four zero-days in Microsoft Exchange. One of the characteristics of the campaign, in the later days when the Chinese probably realized that the vulnerabilities would soon be fixed, was to install a web shell in compromised networks that …