Industry News

The U.S. Coast Guard is expanding its Cyber Command operations and building out cybersecurity protection teams, officials testified Thursday. Rear Admiral John Vann, commander of the Coast Guard Cyber Command, told lawmakers the military branch has increasingly "invested in growing and maturing Coast Guard Cyber Command to assess, identify and respond to cyber risks and threats" in recent years.

The hacking group responsible for taking down Fulton County's websites in Georgia is threatening to publish documents from the state's court system — including ones related to the criminal case against Donald Trump — unless it gets paid a ransom.

In a message posted online Saturday, in both English and Russian, the hacking group called LockBit said the stolen documents "contain a lot of interesting things and Donald Trump's court cases that could affect the upcoming US election."

A relative newcomer to the ransomware scene is claiming to have successfully hacked game developer and distributor Epic Games.

The Mogilevich gang made the claim overnight, posting the details of the apparent hack on its darknet leak site. “We have quietly carried out an attack to [sic] Epic Games’ servers,” a Mogilevich spokesperson said.

US president Joe Biden will sign an executive order on Wednesday aimed at preventing a handful of countries, including China, North Korea, and Russia, from purchasing sensitive information about Americans through commercial data brokers in the United States.

Administration officials say categories of sensitive data, including personal identifiers, precise location information, and biometrics—vital tools for waging cyberattacks, espionage, and blackmail operations against the US—are being amassed by what the White House is calling “countries of concern.”

JPCERT/CC has confirmed that Lazarus has released malicious Python packages to PyPI, the official Python package repository (Figure 1). The Python packages confirmed this time are as follows:

Cybersecurity researchers identified a suspected Iranian espionage campaign targeting aerospace, aviation and defense industries across the Middle East, including in Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Threat intelligence firm Mandiant published a report Tuesday night that links a threat actor tracked as UNC1549, allegedly associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, to a series of coordinated attacks targeting Middle East entities affiliated with the aerospace and defense sectors.

U.S. and international authorities on Tuesday urged owners of routers used in a Russian botnet operation to ensure the devices cannot still be exploited by malicious actors.

The additional warning came a week after a coordinated international action by the FBI and others disrupted a Russian GRU-led hacking campaign that infiltrated more than a thousand home and small business routers that were used to carry out cyber espionage around the globe.

Mark Nelson took the call in an immigration detention center—a place that, to him, felt just like prison. It had the same prison windows, the same tiny box rooms. By the time the phone rang, he’d already spent 10 days detained there, and he was wracked with worry that he would be forced onto a plane without the chance to say goodbye to his kids. So when his lawyers relayed the two options available under UK law—either stay in detention indefinitely or go home wearing a tracking device—it didn’t exactly feel like a choice.

Six days before Christmas, the US Department of Justice loudly announced a win in the ongoing fight against the scourge of ransomware: An FBI-led, international operation had targeted the notorious hacking group known as BlackCat or AlphV, releasing decryption keys to foil its ransom attempts against hundreds of victims and seizing the dark web sites it had used to threaten and extort them. “In disrupting the BlackCat ransomware group, the Justice Department has once again hacked the hackers,” deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco declared in a statement.

After 10 years of development, multiple changes in direction and leadership, and a plethora of leaks, Apple has reportedly ended work on its electric car project. According to a report in Bloomberg, the company is shifting some of the staff to work on generative AI projects within the company and planning layoffs for some others.