encryption | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Twitter is officially beginning to roll out support for  encrypted direct messages (DMs)  on the platform, more than five months after its chief executive Elon Musk  confirmed  plans for the feature in November 2022. The "Phase 1" of the initiative will appear as separate conversations alongside existing direct messages on users' inboxes. Encrypted chats carry a lock icon badge to visually differentiate them. That said, the opt-in feature is currently limited to verified users or affiliates to a verified organization. It's also essential both the sender and recipient are on the latest versions of the Twitter apps across Android, iOS, and desktop web. Another criteria to send and receive encrypted messages is that the recipient must follow the sender, has sent a message to the sender in the past, or has accepted a direct message request from the sender at some point. While Twitter did not disclose the exact method it uses to secure the conversations, the company ...

Microsoft said it teamed up with Fortra and Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Health-ISAC) to tackle the abuse of Cobalt Strike by cybercriminals to distribute malware, including ransomware. To that end, the tech giant's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) revealed that it secured a  court order  in the U.S. to "remove illegal, legacy copies of Cobalt Strike so they can no longer be used by cybercriminals." While Cobalt Strike, developed and maintained by Fortra (formerly HelpSystems), is a legitimate post-exploitation tool used for adversary simulation, illegal cracked versions of the software have been weaponized by threat actors over the years. Ransomware groups, in particular, have leveraged Cobalt Strike after obtaining initial access to a target environment to escalate privileges, lateral move across the network, and deploy file-encrypting malware. "The ransomware families associated with or deployed by cracked copies of Cobalt Strike have been link...

Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps off a previously undocumented ransomware strain called  Rorschach  that's both sophisticated and fast. "What makes Rorschach stand out from other ransomware strains is its high level of customization and its technically unique features that have not been seen before in ransomware," Check Point Research  said  in a new report. "In fact, Rorschach is one of the  fastest ransomware strains  ever observed, in terms of the speed of its encryption." The cybersecurity firm said it observed the ransomware deployed against an unnamed U.S.-based company, adding it found no branding or overlaps that connect it to any previously known ransomware actors. However, further analysis of Rorschach's source code reveals similarities to  Babuk ransomware , which suffered a leak in September 2021, and  LockBit 2.0 . On top of that, the ransom notes sent out to the victims appear to be inspired by that of  Yanluow...

Multi-cloud data storage, once merely a byproduct of the great cloud migration, has now become a strategy for data management. "Multi-cloud by design," and its companion the supercloud, is an ecosystem in which several cloud systems work together to provide many organizational benefits, including increased scale and overall resiliency. And now, even security teams who have long been the holdout on wide-scale cloud adoption, may find a reason to rejoice. Born out of the multi-cloud approach, cyberstorage enables companies to not only enjoy the benefits that multi-cloud brings but also eliminate the risk of data exposure at the same time, marking the beginning of the multi-cloud maturity era. What Is The Supercloud? While many organizations ended up with multiple cloud services as a byproduct of interdepartmental needs, today organizations are intentionally building multi-cloud environments. And rather than manage the various cloud services individually, many are implementin...

U.S. government agencies have released a joint cybersecurity advisory detailing the indicators of compromise (IoCs) and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) associated with the notorious  LockBit 3.0 ransomware . "The LockBit 3.0 ransomware operations function as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model and is a continuation of previous versions of the ransomware, LockBit 2.0, and LockBit," the authorities  said . The alert comes courtesy of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC). Since emerging in late 2019, the  LockBit actors  have invested significant  technical efforts  to develop and fine-tune its malware, issuing two major updates — LockBit 2.0, released in mid-2021, and  LockBit 3.0 , released in June 2022. The two versions are also known as LockBit Red and LockBit Black, respectively. "LockBit 3...