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Estonian National Charged in U.S. for Acquiring Electronics and Metasploit Pro for Russian Military

Estonian National Charged in U.S. for Acquiring Electronics and Metasploit Pro for Russian Military
Apr 10, 2023 Hacking Tool / Cyber Threat
An Estonian national has been  charged  in the U.S. for purchasing U.S.-made electronics on behalf of the Russian government and military. The 45-year-old individual, Andrey Shevlyakov, was arrested on March 28, 2023, in Tallinn. He has been indicted with 18 counts of conspiracy and other charges. If found guilty, he faces up to 20 years in prison. Court documents allege that Shevlyakov operated front companies that were used to import sensitive electronics from U.S. manufacturers. The goods were then shipped to Russia, bypassing export restrictions. The purchased items included analog-to-digital converters and low-noise pre-scalers and synthesizers that are found in defense systems. Shevlyakov is also accused of attempting to acquire hacking tools like Rapid7 Metasploit Pro, a legitimate penetration testing and adversary simulation software. Although Shevlyakov was placed in Entity List in 2012 by the U.S. government for acting as a procurement agent for Russia, he is said to ha

Hackers Deploy IceApple Exploitation Framework on Hacked MS Exchange Servers

Hackers Deploy IceApple Exploitation Framework on Hacked MS Exchange Servers
May 12, 2022
Researchers have detailed a previously undocumented .NET-based post-exploitation framework called IceApple that has been deployed on Microsoft Exchange server instances to facilitate reconnaissance and data exfiltration. "Suspected to be the work of a state-nexus adversary, IceApple remains under active development, with 18 modules observed in use across a number of enterprise environments, as of May 2022," CrowdStrike  said  in a Wednesday report. The cybersecurity firm, which discovered the sophisticated malware in late 2021, noted its presence in multiple victim networks and in geographically distinct locations. Targeted victims span a wide range of sectors, including technology, academic, and government entities. A post-exploitation toolset, as the name implies, is not used to provide initial access, but is rather employed to carry out follow-on attacks after having already compromised the hosts in question. IceApple is notable for the fact that it's an in-memo

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
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