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A 22-year-old man from the U.S. state of Kansas has been indicted on charges that he unauthorizedly accessed a public water facility's computer system, jeopardizing the residents' safety and health in the local community. Wyatt A. Travnichek, 22, of Ellsworth County, Kansas, has been charged with one count of tampering with a public water system and one count of reckless damage to a protected computer during unauthorized access, according to the Department of Justice (DoJ). "By illegally tampering with a public drinking water system, the defendant threatened the safety and health of an entire community,"  said  Lance Ehrig, Special Agent in Charge of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Criminal Investigation Division in Kansas. "EPA and its law enforcement partners are committed to upholding the laws designed to protect our drinking water systems from harm or threat of harm. Today's indictment sends a clear message that individuals who intentionall...

Data breaches remain a constant threat, and no industry or organization is immune from the risks. From  Fortune 500  companies to startups, password-related breaches continue to spread seemingly unchecked. As a result of the volume of data breaches and cybersecurity incidents, hackers now have access to a vast swathe of credentials that they can use to power various password-related attacks. One example of this is credential stuffing attacks, which accounted for  1.5 billion  incidents in the last quarter of 2020—a staggering 90% increase from Q1 2020. The rapid pivot to digital in response to the pandemic has been a key contributor to the explosive growth in cybersecurity attacks. With organizations shifting more services online and investing in new applications that facilitate virtual interactions with employees and customers, this has changed the security landscape and presented an array of new avenues for hackers to exploit. However, in a rush to move everyth...

A novel technique adopted by attackers finds ways to use Microsoft's Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) so as to deploy malicious payloads on Windows machines stealthily. In 2020, hospitals, retirement communities, and medical centers bore the brunt of an  ever-shifting phishing campaign  that distributed custom backdoors such as KEGTAP, which ultimately paved the way for RYUK ransomware attacks. But new  research  by FireEye's Mandiant cyber forensics arm has now revealed a previously unknown persistence mechanism that shows the adversaries made use of BITS to launch the backdoor. Introduced in Windows XP,  BITS  is a component of Microsoft Windows, which makes use of idle network bandwidth to facilitate the asynchronous transfer of files between machines. This is achieved by creating a job — a container that includes the files to download or upload. BITS is commonly used to deliver operating system updates to clients as well as by Window...

A North Korean government-backed campaign targeting cybersecurity researchers with malware has re-emerged with new tactics in their arsenal as part of a fresh social engineering attack. In an update shared on Wednesday, Google's Threat Analysis Group said the attackers behind the operation set up a fake security company called SecuriElite and a slew of social media accounts across Twitter and LinkedIn in an attempt to trick unsuspecting researchers into visiting the company's booby-trapped website "where a browser exploit was waiting to be triggered." "The new website claims the company is an offensive security company located in Turkey that offers pentests, software security assessments and exploits," TAG's Adam Weidemann  said . The website is said to have gone live on March 17. A total of eight Twitter profiles and seven LinkedIn profiles, who claimed to be vulnerability researchers and human resources personnel at different security firms (inclu...

You're fully aware of the need to stop threats at the front door and then hunt any that got through that first gate, so your company installed an EPP/ EDR solution. But like most companies, you've already come across its shortcoming – and these are amplified since you have a small security team. More than likely, you noticed that it has its share of detection blind spots and limitations for which you need to tack on more detection technologies.  Remediation requires manual effort, and in terms of operation, it's become too much of an investment on your already resource-constrained staff. Deployment took you ages, so you're somewhat wary of introducing new technology and going through that process again.  What should you do – fight for more resources, flight from the EDR/ EPP combo to other technological solutions, or freeze by accepting this painful situation and updating the board that your risk levels remain high?  When fight and freeze are typically th...

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed details of a sophisticated campaign that deploys malicious backdoors for the purpose of exfiltrating information from a number of industry sectors located in Japan. Dubbed "A41APT" by Kaspersky researchers, the findings delve into a new slew of attacks undertaken by  APT10  (aka Stone Panda or Cicada) using previously undocumented malware to deliver as many as three payloads such as SodaMaster, P8RAT, and FYAnti. The long-running intelligence-gathering operation first came into the scene in March 2019, with activities spotted as recently as November 2020, when  reports  emerged of Japan-linked companies being targeted by the threat actor in over 17 regions worldwide. The fresh attacks uncovered by Kaspersky are said to have occurred in January 2021. The infection chain leverages a multi-stage attack process, with the initial intrusion happening via abuse of SSL-VPN by exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities or stolen c...