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A former employee of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been sentenced to nearly 22 years (262 months) in prison for attempting to transfer classified documents to Russia. "This sentence should serve as a stark warning to all those entrusted with protecting national defense information that there are consequences to betraying that trust,"  said  FBI Director Christopher Wray. Jareh Sebastian Dalke, 32, of Colorado Springs was employed as an Information Systems Security Designer between June 6 to July 1, 2022, during which time he had access to sensitive information. Despite his short tenure at the intelligence agency, Dalke is said to have made contact with a person he thought was a Russian agent sometime between August and September of that year. In reality, the person was an undercover agent working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). To demonstrate his "legitimate access and willingness to share," he the...

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has admitted to buying internet browsing records from data brokers to identify the websites and apps Americans use that would otherwise require a court order, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden said last week. "The U.S. government should not be funding and legitimizing a shady industry whose flagrant violations of Americans' privacy are not just unethical, but illegal," Wyden  said  in a letter to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Avril Haines, in addition to urging the government to take steps to "ensure that U.S. intelligence agencies only purchase data on Americans that has been obtained in a lawful manner." Metadata about users' browsing habits can pose a serious privacy risk, as the information could be used to glean personal details about an individual based on the websites they frequent. This could include websites that offer resources related to mental health, assistance for survivors of sexual assault or do...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

A former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) employee has been arrested on charges of attempting to sell classified information to a foreign spy, who was actually an undercover agent working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Jareh Sebastian Dalke, 30, was employed at the NSA for less than a month from June 6, 2022, to July 1, 2022, serving as an Information Systems Security Designer as part of a temporary assignment in Washington D.C. According to an  affidavit  filed by the FBI, Dalke was also a member of the U.S. Army from about 2015 to 2018 and held a Secret security clearance, which he received in 2016. The defendant further held a Top Secret security clearance during his tenure at the NSA. "Between August and September 2022, Dalke used an encrypted email account to transmit excerpts of three classified documents he had obtained during his employment to an individual Dalke believed to be working for a foreign government," the Justice Department (DoJ) ...

In another finding that could expose developers to increased risk of a supply chain attack, it has emerged that nearly one-third of the packages in PyPI, the Python Package Index, trigger automatic code execution upon downloading them. "A worrying feature in pip/PyPI allows code to automatically run when developers are merely downloading a package," Checkmarx researcher Yehuda Gelb  said  in a technical report published this week. "Also, this feature is alarming due to the fact that a great deal of the malicious packages we are finding in the wild use this feature of code execution upon installation to achieve higher infection rates." One of the ways by which packages can be installed for Python is by executing the " pip install " command, which, in turn, invokes a file called "setup.py" that comes bundled along with the module. "setup.py," as the name implies, is a  setup script  that's used to specify metadata associated wit...

The Five Eyes nations have released a  joint cybersecurity advisory  warning of increased  malicious attacks  from Russian state-sponsored actors and criminal groups targeting critical infrastructure organizations amidst the ongoing military siege on Ukraine. "Evolving intelligence indicates that the Russian government is exploring options for potential cyberattacks," authorities from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S.  said . "Russia's invasion of Ukraine could expose organizations both within and beyond the region to increased malicious cyber activity. This activity may occur as a response to the unprecedented economic costs imposed on Russia as well as material support provided by the United States and U.S. allies and partners." The  advisory  follows  another alert  from the U.S. government cautioning of nation-state actors deploying specialized malware to maintain access to industrial control systems (ICS) and su...

Amid renewed tensions between the U.S. and Russia over  Ukraine  and  Kazakhstan , American cybersecurity and intelligence agencies on Tuesday released a joint advisory on how to detect, respond to, and mitigate cyberattacks orchestrated by Russian state-sponsored actors. To that end, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and National Security Agency (NSA) have laid bare the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by the adversaries, including spear-phishing, brute-force, and  exploiting known vulnerabilities  to gain initial access to target networks. The list of flaws exploited by Russian hacking groups to gain an initial foothold, which the agencies said are "common but effective," are below — CVE-2018-13379  (FortiGate VPNs) CVE-2019-1653  (Cisco router) CVE-2019-2725  (Oracle WebLogic Server) CVE-2019-7609  (Kibana) CVE-2019-9670  (Zimbra software) C...

An ongoing brute-force attack campaign targeting enterprise cloud environments has been spearheaded by the Russian military intelligence since mid-2019, according to a joint advisory published by intelligence agencies in the U.K. and U.S. The National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) formally attributed the incursions to the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) 85th Main Special Service Center (GTsSS). The  threat actor  is also tracked under various monikers, including  APT28  (FireEye Mandiant),  Fancy Bear  (CrowdStrike),  Sofacy  (Kaspersky),  STRONTIUM  (Microsoft), and  Iron Twilight  (Secureworks). APT28 has a track record of leveraging password spray and brute-force login attempts to plunder valid credentials that enable future surveillance or intrusion oper...

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) used a partnership with Denmark's foreign and military intelligence service to eavesdrop on top politicians and high-ranking officials in Germany, Sweden, Norway, and France by tapping into Danish underwater internet cables between 2012 and 2014. Details of the covert wiretapping were  broken  by Copenhagen-based public broadcaster DR over the weekend based on interviews with nine unnamed sources, all of whom are said to have access to classified information held by the Danish Defence Intelligence Service (Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste or FE). German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the then-German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and the opposition leader at the time, Peer Steinbrück, are said to have been targeted through the Danish-American pact. Using the telephone numbers of politicians as search parameters, the report alleged that the NSA "intercepted everything from text messages to phone calls that passed through the ca...

On August 13, 2016, a hacking unit calling itself " The Shadow Brokers " announced that it had stolen malware tools and exploits used by the Equation Group, a sophisticated threat actor believed to be affiliated to the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit of the U.S.  National Security Agency  (NSA). Although  the group  has since signed off following the unprecedented disclosures, new "conclusive" evidence unearthed by Check Point Research shows that this was not an isolated incident, and that other threat actors may have had access to some of the same tools before they were published. The previously undocumented cyber-theft took place more than two years prior to the Shadow Brokers episode, the American-Israeli cybersecurity company said in an exhaustive report published today, resulting in U.S.-developed cyber tools reaching the hands of a Chinese advanced persistent threat which then repurposed them in order to strike American targets. "The caught-in-...

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) on Friday said DNS over HTTPS (DoH) — if configured appropriately in enterprise environments — can help prevent "numerous" initial access, command-and-control, and exfiltration techniques used by threat actors. "DNS over Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Transport Layer Security (HTTPS), often referred to as DNS over HTTPS (DoH), encrypts DNS requests by using HTTPS to provide privacy, integrity, and 'last mile' source authentication with a client's DNS resolver," according to the NSA's  new guidance . Proposed in 2018,  DoH  is a protocol for performing remote Domain Name System resolution via the HTTPS protocol. One of the major shortcomings with current DNS lookups is that even when someone visits a site that uses HTTPS, the DNS query and its response is sent over an unencrypted connection, thus allowing third-party eavesdropping on the network to track every website a user is visiting. Even worse, the ...

The U.S. government on Tuesday formally pointed fingers at the Russian government for orchestrating the massive  SolarWinds supply chain attack  that came to light early last month. "This work indicates that an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor, likely Russian in origin, is responsible for most or all of the recently discovered, ongoing cyber compromises of both government and non-governmental networks," the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the National Security Agency (NSA)  said  in a joint statement. Russia, however,  denied  any involvement in the operation on December 13, stating it "does not conduct offensive operations in the cyber domain." The FBI, CISA, ODNI, and NSA are members of the Cyber Unified Coordination Group (UCG), a newly-formed task force put in place by the White House National Security Council to...

The United States government today filed a lawsuit against Edward Snowden , a former contractor for the CIA and NSA government agencies who made headlines worldwide in 2013 when he fled the country and leaked top-secret information about NSA's global and domestic surveillance activities. And you would be more surprised to know the reason for this lawsuit—No, Snowden has not been sued for leaking NSA secrets, instead for publishing a book without submitting it to the agencies for pre-publication review. In his latest book, titled " Permanent Record " and released today on September 17th, Edward Snowden for the first time revealed the story of his life, including how he helped the agency to built that surveillance system. Permanent Record also details about the aftermath of Snowden decision to disclose hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents exposing the United States mass surveillance programs to the world. According to a press release U.S. Department of J...

Update (4/4/2019) — Great news. NSA today finally released the complete source code for GHIDRA version 9.0.2 which is now available on its Github repository . GHIDRA  is agency's home-grown classified software reverse engineering tool that agency experts have been using internally for over a decade to hunt down security bugs in software and applications. GHIDRA is a Java-based reverse engineering framework that features a graphical user interface (GUI) and has been designed to run on a variety of platforms including Windows, macOS, and Linux. Reverse engineering a program or software involves disassembling, i.e. converting binary instructions into assembly code when its source code is unavailable, helping software engineers, especially malware analysts, understand the functionality of the code and actual design and implementation information. The existence of GHIDRA was first publicly revealed by WikiLeaks in CIA Vault 7 leaks , but the NSA today publicly released t...

A former National Security Agency contractor—who stole an enormous amount of sensitive information from the agency and then stored it at his home and car for over two decades—today changed his plea to guilty. The theft was labeled as the largest heist of classified government material in America's history. Harold Thomas Martin III, a 54-year-old Navy veteran from Glen Burnie, abused his top-secret security clearances to stole at least 50 terabytes of classified national defense data from government computers over two decades while working for a number of NSA departments between 1996 and 2016. In August 2016, the FBI arrested Martin at his Maryland home and found "six full bankers' boxes" worth of documents, many of which were marked "Secret" and "Top Secret," in his home and car. At the time of his arrest in August 2016, Martin also worked for Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp, the same company that previously employed  Edward Snowden  ...

The United States' National Security Agency (NSA) is planning to release its internally developed reverse engineering tool for free at the upcoming RSA security conference 2019 that will be held in March in San Francisco. The existence of the framework, dubbed GHIDRA, was first publicly revealed by WikiLeaks in CIA Vault 7 leaks, but the tool once again came to light after Senior NSA Adviser Robert Joyce announced to publicly release the tool for free in his RSA Conference session description. Reverse engineering tool is a disassembler, for example, IDA-Pro, that help researchers identify certain portions of a program to see how they work by reading information like its processor instructions, instruction lengths, and more. GHIDRA is a Java-based reverse engineering framework that features a graphical user interface (GUI) and has been designed to run on a variety of platforms including Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems, and also supports a variety of processor ...

Has Wikileaks founder Julian Assange officially been charged with any unspecified criminal offense in the United States? — YES United States prosecutors have accidentally revealed the existence of criminal charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a recently unsealed court filing in an unrelated ongoing sex crime case in the Eastern District of Virginia. Assistant US Attorney Kellen S. Dwyer, who made this disclosure on August 22, urged the judge to keep the indictment [ pdf ] prepared against Assange sealed (secret) "due to the sophistication of the defendant, and the publicity surrounding the case." Dwyer is assigned to the WikiLeaks case. Dwyer also said the charges would "need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges" in the indictment and can, therefore "no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter." WikiLeaks, the website that published thousands of classified U.S. government do...

A former NSA employee has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison for illegally taking a copy of highly classified documents and hacking tools to his home computer between 2010 and 2015, which were later stolen by Russian hackers. Nghia Hoang Pho, 68, of Ellicott City, Maryland—who worked as a developer with Tailored Access Operations (TAO) hacking group at the NSA since April 2006—held various security clearances and had access to national defense and classified information. The personal Windows computer on which Pho stored the classified documents and tools was running Kaspersky antivirus software, which was then allegedly used, one way or another, by Russian hackers to steal the documents in 2015. Though Kaspersky Lab consistently denied any direct involvement in helping Russian intelligence agencies to pilfer sensitive secrets, the United States government banned federal agencies from using Kaspersky antivirus software over spying fears. In response, Kasper...

A former NSA contractor, who pleaded guilty to leaking a classified report on Russian hacking of the 2016 U.S. presidential election to an online news outlet last year, has been sentenced to five years and three months in prison. Reality Winner , a 26-year-old Georgia woman who held a top-secret security clearance and worked as a government contractor in Georgia with Pluribus International, initially faced 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. However, in the U.S. District Court in Augusta, Georgia on Thursday, Winner agreed to a plea agreement that called for five years and three months in prison with three years of supervision after release. Back in May 2017, Winner printed out a top-secret document detailing about the Russian hacking into U.S. voting systems, smuggled the report out of the agency in her underwear, and then mailed it anonymously to The Intercept. The Intercept, an online publication that has been publishing classified NSA documents leaked by Edward Snow...