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Tailored Access Operations Unit | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Kaspersky: NSA Worker's Computer Was Already Infected With Malware

Kaspersky: NSA Worker's Computer Was Already Infected With Malware

Nov 17, 2017
Refuting allegations that its anti-virus product helped Russian spies steal classified files from an NSA employee's laptop, Kaspersky Lab has released more findings that suggest the computer in question may have been infected with malware. Moscow-based cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab on Thursday published the results of its own internal investigation claiming the NSA worker who took classified documents home had a personal home computer overwhelmed with malware. According to the latest Kaspersky report, the telemetry data its antivirus collected from the NSA staffer's home computer contained large amounts of malware files which acted as a backdoor to the PC. The report also provided more details about the malicious backdoor that infected the NSA worker's computer when he installed a pirated version of Microsoft Office 2013 .ISO containing the Mokes backdoor, also known as Smoke Loader. Backdoor On NSA Worker's PC May Have Helped Other Hackers Steal Classi
NSA Accidentally Took Down Syria's Internet While Infiltrating Central Router System

NSA Accidentally Took Down Syria's Internet While Infiltrating Central Router System

Aug 14, 2014
Before proceeding towards the story, let's first go back two years to figure out what was wrong when Syria was completely blackout - sudden disconnect from the Internet - which lasted for the period of three days in 2012. Is that the Syrian government behind the blackout ? The outage took place during a period of intense fighting in the country's still-ongoing civil war. So, it was supposed that may it be the government's fault. But, the Syrian Minister of Information said that the government didn't disable the Internet, instead the outage was caused by a cable being cut by some terrorists. When investigated, it was unlikely to be the case. So, Who was actually behind Syria Blackout ? NSA? Yup! It was the same NSA who was behind a number of major happenings. National Security Agency ( NSA ) – the God-like powered agency that had ruled over the privacy of the entire world from countries to individuals, the one with master access to read anyone's data, intruded into larg
Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
Project TURBINE: NSA spreads sophisticated Malware Worldwide

Project TURBINE: NSA spreads sophisticated Malware Worldwide

Mar 13, 2014
Besides collecting metadata and inserting backdoor to the devices and softwares, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has an eye on each post, picture, message you have ever sent on Facebook. I know you won't be feeling free considering your privacy, but, this is what the NSA is doing to you. The new revelation from the Glenn Greenwald 's desk remove the mask from one more secret surveillance operation carried out by the US intelligence agency NSA, the extensive program dubbed as ' TURBINE ', according to the classified files provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden . Yes, the NSA, who has been working with its dedicated hacking unit, Tailored Access Operations (TAO) from the past several years on enlarging its caliber to infect devices with spyware and creating its own command-and-control servers to manage millions of infected systems at a time. The secret documents presented by The Intercept  website shows that the NSA with its British counterpart G
cyber security

Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.
Windows Error Crash Reports or Treasure of Zero-Day vulnerabilities for NSA?

Windows Error Crash Reports or Treasure of Zero-Day vulnerabilities for NSA?

Jan 03, 2014
I am sure that you all have been familiar with the above shown annoying Window Operating System error messages that many times pop ups on your screen while working on the system in case of process failure i.e. " The system has recovered from a serious error. A log of this error has been created. Please tell Microsoft about this problem " The message that prompts ask the user to report the problem to Microsoft followed by the options to Send an error report or Not send . Most of the time Gentle users like you and me used to submit these error reports to aware the Microsoft about the problem. But What if these crash reports can be abused to identify the vulnerabilities of your system for Spying? NSA is intercepting wide range of Internet Traffic including many Encrypted connections and naturally unencrypted also and surprisingly, by default Microsoft encrypts its reports, but the messages are transmitted unencrypted or over standard HTTP connections to watson.microsoft.com .
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