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The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Monday said it seized 50,676 Bitcoin in November 2021 that was stolen in the 2012 hack of the now-defunct Silk Road dark web marketplace. The bitcoin, which was obtained in 2012 and valued at $3.36 billion when it was discovered last year, is now worth $1.04 billion. Additionally recovered were $661,900 in cash, 25 Casascius coins with an approximate value of 174 Bitcoin, and gold- and silver-colored bars. It's also one of the largest cryptocurrency seizures to date, followed by the confiscation of $3.6 billion worth of bitcoin  earlier this February  tied to the 2016 breach of the Bitfinex crypto exchange. The Justice Department said it conducted the seizure on November 9, 2021, pursuant to a search warrant issued to James Zhong's house located in the U.S. state of Georgia. It also said the keys to the tokens were found in an underground floor safe and on a "single-board computer that was submerged under blankets in a popcorn t...

The news surrounding the slowing economy has many wondering how much of an impact it will have on their businesses – and lives. And there's good reason to start preparing.  A recent survey by McKinsey & Company found that 85% of small and midsize businesses plan to increase their security spending heading into 2023, while Gartner recently projected that 2022 IT spending will only grow by 3%, down from a 10% growth rate the year before. We're already seeing businesses making cuts and freezing budgets. And smaller organizations that already have limited budgets are more vulnerable than ever. While we are still dealing with the unknown, one thing  is  clear: even as the economy slows down, security threats don't. But there's hope.  A  new eBook  illuminates how one solution can not only help increase security operations efficiency but also provide economic safeguards for security teams that are already strapped for cash.  What is the solution? C...

Australian health insurer Medibank today confirmed that personal data belonging to around 9.7 million of its current and former customers were accessed following a ransomware incident. The  attack , according to the company, was detected in its IT network on October 12 in a manner that it said was "consistent with the precursors to a ransomware event," prompting it to isolate its systems, but not before the attackers exfiltrated the data. "This figure represents around 5.1 million Medibank customers, around 2.8 million ahm customers, and around 1.8 million international customers," the Melbourne-based firm  noted . Compromised details include names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses, as well as Medicare numbers (but not expiry dates) for ahm customers, and passport numbers (but not expiry dates) and visa details for international student customers. It further said the incident resulted in the theft of health claims data for about 16...

Facebook appears to have silently rolled out a tool that allows users to remove their contact information, such as phone numbers and email addresses, uploaded by others. The existence of the  tool , which is buried inside a  Help Center page  about " Friending ," was first reported by  Business Insider  last week. It's offered as a way for "Non-users" to "exercise their rights under applicable laws." An Internet Archive search via the Wayback Machine  shows  that the option has been available since at least May 29, 2022. When users  sync the contact lists  on their devices with Facebook (or any other service), it's worth pointing out the  privacy violation , which stems from the fact that those contacts didn't explicitly consent to the upload. "Someone may have uploaded their address book to Facebook, Messenger, or Instagram with your contact information in it," Facebook notes in the page. "You can ask us to confirm whether...

Security researchers are warning of "a trove of sensitive information" leaking through urlscan.io, a website scanner for suspicious and malicious URLs. "Sensitive URLs to shared documents, password reset pages, team invites, payment invoices and more are publicly listed and searchable," Positive Security co-founder, Fabian Bräunlein,  said  in a report published on November 2, 2022. The Berlin-based cybersecurity firm said it started an investigation in the aftermath of a  notification  sent by GitHub in February 2022 to an unknown number of users about sharing their usernames and private repository names (i.e.,  GitHub Pages URLs ) to urlscan.io for metadata analysis as part of an automated process. Urlscan.io, which has been described as a  sandbox for the web , is  integrated  into several security solutions  via its API . "With the type of integration of this API (for example via a security tool that scans every incoming email ...

A phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform known as  Robin Banks  has relocated its attack infrastructure to DDoS-Guard, a Russian provider of bulletproof hosting services. The switch comes after "Cloudflare disassociated Robin Banks phishing infrastructure from its services, causing a multi-day disruption to operations," according to a  report  from cybersecurity company IronNet. Robin Banks was  first documented  in July 2022 when the platform's abilities to offer ready-made phishing kits to criminal actors were revealed, making it possible to steal the financial information of customers of popular banks and other online services. It was also found to prompt users to enter Google and Microsoft credentials on rogue landing pages, suggesting an attempt on part of the malware authors to monetize initial access to corporate networks for post-exploitation activities such as espionage and ransomware. In recent months, Cloudflare's decision to blocklist its ...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered 29 packages in Python Package Index (PyPI), the official third-party software repository for the Python programming language, that aim to infect developers' machines with a malware called W4SP Stealer . "The main attack seems to have started around October 12, 2022, slowly picking up steam to a concentrated effort around October 22," software supply chain security company Phylum  said  in a report published this week. The list of offending packages is as follows: typesutil, typestring, sutiltype, duonet, fatnoob, strinfer, pydprotect, incrivelsim, twyne, pyptext, installpy, faq, colorwin, requests-httpx, colorsama, shaasigma, stringe, felpesviadinho, cypress, pystyte, pyslyte, pystyle, pyurllib, algorithmic, oiu, iao, curlapi, type-color, and pyhints. Collectively, the packages have been downloaded more than 5,700 times, with some of the libraries (e.g., twyne and colorsama) relying on typosquatting to trick unsuspecting users...

Microsoft is warning of an uptick among nation-state and criminal actors increasingly leveraging publicly-disclosed zero-day vulnerabilities for breaching target environments. The tech giant, in its 114-page  Digital Defense Report , said it has "observed a reduction in the time between the announcement of a vulnerability and the commoditization of that vulnerability," making it imperative that organizations patch such exploits in a timely manner. This also corroborates with an April 2022 advisory from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which  found  that bad actors are "aggressively" targeting newly disclosed software bugs against broad targets globally. Microsoft noted that it only takes 14 days on average for an exploit to be available in the wild after public disclosure of a flaw, stating that while zero-day attacks are initially limited in scope, they tend to be swiftly adopted by other threat actors, leading to indiscriminat...

The Transparent Tribe threat actor has been linked to a new campaign aimed at Indian government organizations with trojanized versions of a two-factor authentication solution called Kavach . "This group abuses Google advertisements for the purpose of malvertising to distribute backdoored versions of Kavach multi-authentication (MFA) applications," Zscaler ThreatLabz researcher Sudeep Singh  said  in a Thursday analysis. The cybersecurity company said the advanced persistent threat group has also conducted low-volume credential harvesting attacks in which rogue websites masquerading as official Indian government portals were set up to lure unwitting users into entering their passwords. Transparent Tribe, also known by the monikers APT36, Operation C-Major, and Mythic Leopard, is a suspected Pakistan  adversarial collective  that has a  history  of striking Indian and Afghanistan entities. The latest attack chain is not the first time the threat actor h...

Not too long ago, there was a clear separation between the operational technology (OT) that drives the physical functions of a company – on the factory floor, for example – and the information technology (IT) that manages a company's data to enable management and planning.  As IT assets became increasingly connected to the outside world via the internet, OT remained isolated from IT – and the rest of the world. However, the spread of Industrial IoT (IIoT) as well as the need for constant monitoring and tracking information from manufacturing and assembly lines mean the connection between IT and OT systems has greatly expanded. OT is no longer isolated. OT is now just as exposed to the outside world as IT is. What does this mean for OT security, where hard-to-access devices needed for 24/7 production are difficult to patch? Let's take a look. The Air Gap Is Gone Not so long ago, any data exchange between IT and OT operated via a "sneaker net." An operator would p...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  published  three Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories about multiple vulnerabilities in software from ETIC Telecom, Nokia, and Delta Industrial Automation. Prominent among them is a set of three flaws affecting ETIC Telecom's Remote Access Server (RAS), which "could allow an attacker to obtain sensitive information and compromise the vulnerable device and other connected machines," CISA said. This includes CVE-2022-3703 (CVSS score: 9.0), a critical flaw that stems from the RAS web portal's inability to verify the authenticity of firmware, thereby making it possible to slip in a rogue package that grants backdoor access to the adversary. Two other flaws relate to a directory traversal bug in the RAS API (CVE-2022-41607, CVSS score: 8.6) and a file upload issue (CVE-2022-40981, CVSS score: 8.3) that can be exploited to read arbitrary files and upload malicious files that can compromise th...

A new analysis of tools put to use by the Black Basta ransomware operation has identified ties between the threat actor and the  FIN7  (aka Carbanak) group. This link "could suggest either that Black Basta and FIN7 maintain a special relationship or that one or more individuals belong to both groups," cybersecurity firm SentinelOne  said  in a technical write-up shared with The Hacker News. Black Basta, which  emerged  earlier this year, has been attributed to a ransomware spree that has claimed over 90 organizations as of September 2022, suggesting that the adversary is both well-organized and well-resourced. One notable aspect that makes the group stand out, per SentinelOne, is the fact that there have been no signs of its operators attempting to recruit affiliates or advertising the malware as a RaaS on darknet forums or crimeware marketplaces. This has raised the possibility that the Black Basta developers either cut out affiliates from the chain a...

Every SaaS app user and login is a potential threat; whether it's bad actors or potential disgruntled former associates,  identity management and   access control  is crucial to prevent unwanted or mistaken entrances to the organization's data and systems.  Since enterprises have thousands to tens of thousands of users, and hundreds to thousands of different apps, ensuring each entrance point and user role is secure is no easy feat. Security teams need to monitor all identities to ensure that user activity meets their organization's security guidelines.  Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions administer user identities and control access to enterprise resources and applications. As identities became the new perimeter, making sure this area is governed by the security team is vital. Gartner has recently named a new security discipline called Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) that incorporates detection mechanisms that investigate suspiciou...

A French-speaking threat actor dubbed  OPERA1ER  has been linked to a series of more than 30 successful cyber attacks aimed at banks, financial services, and telecom companies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America between 2018 and 2022. According to Singapore-headquartered cybersecurity company Group-IB, the attacks have led to thefts totaling $11 million, with actual damages estimated to be as high as $30 million. Some of the more recent attacks in 2021 and 2021 have singled out five different banks in Burkina Faso, Benin, Ivory Coast, and Senegal. Many of the victims identified are said to have been compromised twice, and their infrastructure subsequently weaponized to strike other organizations. OPERA1ER, also called by the names DESKTOP-GROUP, Common Raven, and NXSMS, is known to be active since 2016, operating with the goal of conducting financially motivated heists and exfiltration of documents for further use in spear-phishing attacks. "OPERA1ER often operates du...

The operators of RomCom RAT malware are continuing to evolve their campaigns by distributing rogue versions of software such as SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, KeePass password manager, and PDF Reader Pro via fake copycat websites. Targets of the operation consist of victims in Ukraine and select English-speaking countries like the U.K. To be noted, the malicious software in question is not related to any product developed or released by SolarWinds, and is instead an unlicensed, "cracked" version of an old product. "Given the geography of the targets and the current geopolitical situation, it's unlikely that the RomCom RAT threat actor is cybercrime-motivated," the BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence Team  said  in a new analysis. The latest findings  come  a week after the Canadian cybersecurity company disclosed a spear-phishing campaign aimed at Ukrainian entities to deploy a remote access trojan called RomCom RAT. The unknown threat ac...

Popular short-form video-sharing service TikTok is revising its  privacy policy  for European users to make it explicitly clear that user data can be accessed by some employees from across the world, including China. The ByteDance-owned platform, which currently stores European user data in the U.S. and Singapore, said the revision is part of its ongoing data governance efforts to limit employee access to users in the region, minimize data flows outside of it, and store the information locally. The privacy policy update applies to users located in the U.K., the European Economic Area (EEA), and Switzerland, and goes into effect on December 2, 2022, according to  The Guardian . "Based on a demonstrated need to do their job, subject to a series of robust security controls and approval protocols, and by way of methods that are recognised under the GDPR, we allow certain employees within our corporate group located in Brazil, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Phili...

Multiple vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Checkmk IT Infrastructure monitoring software that could be chained together by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to fully take over affected servers.  "These vulnerabilities can be chained together by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to gain code execution on the server running Checkmk version 2.1.0p10 and lower," SonarSource researcher Stefan Schiller  said  in a technical analysis. Checkmk's open source edition of the monitoring tool is based on  Nagios Core  and offers integrations with  NagVis  for the visualization and generation of topological maps of infrastructures, servers, ports, and processes. According to its Munich-based developer tribe29 GmbH, its Enterprise and Raw editions are used by  over 2,000 customers , including Airbus, Adobe, NASA, Siemens, Vodafone, and others. The four vulnerabilities, which consist of two Critical and two Medium severity bugs, are as follows - ...