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Garmin, the maker of fitness trackers, smartwatches and GPS-based wearable devices, is currently dealing with a massive worldwide service interruption after getting hit by a targeted ransomware attack, an employee of the company told The Hacker News on condition of anonymity. The company's website and the Twitter account say, "We are currently experiencing an outage that affects Garmin.com and Garmin Connect." "This outage also affects our call centers, and we are currently unable to receive any calls, emails or online chats. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and apologize for this inconvenience." As a result, the company yesterday was forced to temporarily shut down some of its connected services, including Garmin Express, Garmin Connect mobile, and the website—restricting millions of its users from accessing the cloud services or even syncing their watches locally to the app. Though not much information is available on tech...

Lazarus Group, the notorious hacking group with ties to the North Korean regime, has unleashed a new multi-platform malware framework with an aim to infiltrate corporate entities around the world, steal customer databases, and distribute ransomware. Capable of targeting Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems, the MATA malware framework — so-called because of the authors' reference to the infrastructure as "MataNet" — comes with a wide range of features designed to carry out a variety of malicious activities on infected machines. The MATA campaign is said to have begun as early as April of 2018, with the victimology traced to unnamed companies in software development, e-commerce and internet service provider sectors situated in Poland, Germany, Turkey, Korea, Japan, and India, cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said in its Wednesday analysis. The report offers a comprehensive look at the MATA framework, while also building on previous evidence gathered by researche...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) yesterday revealed charges against two Chinese nationals for their alleged involvement in a decade-long hacking spree targeting dissidents, government agencies, and hundreds of organizations in as many as 11 countries. The 11-count indictment , which was unsealed on Tuesday, alleges LI Xiaoyu (李啸宇) and DONG Jiazhi (董家志) stole terabytes of sensitive data, including from companies developing COVID-19 vaccines, testing technology, and treatments while operating both for private financial gain and behalf of China's Ministry of State Security. "China has now taken its place, alongside Russia, Iran and North Korea, in that shameful club of nations that provide a safe haven for cyber criminals in exchange for those criminals being 'on call' to work for the benefit of the state, [and] to feed the Chinese Communist party's insatiable hunger for American and other non-Chinese companies' hard-earned intellectual property, includ...

An emerging threat actor out of China has been traced to a new hacking campaign aimed at government agencies in India and residents of Hong Kong intending to steal sensitive information, cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes revealed in the latest report shared with The Hacker News. The attacks were observed during the first week of July, coinciding the passage of controversial security law in Hong Kong and India's ban of 59 China-made apps over privacy concerns, weeks after a violent skirmish along the Indo-China border. Attributing the attack with "moderate confidence" to a new Chinese APT group, Malwarebytes said they were able to track their activities based on the "unique phishing attempts" designed to compromise targets in India and Hong Kong. The operators of the APT group have leveraged at least three different Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs), using spear-phishing emails to drop variants of Cobalt Strike and MgBot malware, and bogus Andr...

The United States Department of Justice has extradited two criminals from the Republic of Cyprus—one is a computer hacker suspected of cyber intrusions and extortion, and the other is a money launderer with known connections to the terrorist organization Hezbollah. Both suspects— Joshua Polloso Epifaniou , 21, a resident of Nicosia, and Ghassan Diab , 37, a citizen of Lebanon—were arrested earlier last year and extradited to the United States last weekend. According to the indictment , Epifaniou conducted a brute force attack against the Phoenix-based online review portal Ripoff Report (ROR) in October 2016 and successfully override ROR's login and password protection to gain access to its database through an existing account associated with a ROR employee. In November 2016, Epifaniou tried to extort the company by emailing ROR's CEO with a hyperlink to a video demonstrating Epifaniou's unauthorized access to the ROR CEO's account, threatening him to publicly di...

An OPSEC error by an Iranian threat actor has laid bare the inner workings of the hacking group by providing a rare insight into the "behind-the-scenes look into their methods." IBM's X-Force Incident Response Intelligence Services (IRIS) got hold of nearly five hours worth of video recordings of the state-sponsored group it calls ITG18 (also called Charming Kitten , Phosphorous , or APT35 ) that it uses to train its operators. Some of the victims in the videos included personal accounts of U.S. and Greek Navy personnel, in addition to unsuccessful phishing attempts directed against U.S. state department officials and an unnamed Iranian-American philanthropist. "Some of the videos showed the operator managing adversary-created accounts while others showed the operator testing access and exfiltrating data from previously compromised accounts," the researchers said. The IBM researchers said they found the videos on a virtual private cloud server that wa...

If you ask Alex, he won't admit being old-fashioned. He has been working in the IT industry for a while now and accepts that security is important for the business's health. But reluctant to take security as the business enabler. In today's environment, moving to digitization is a critical step required to drive innovation and business growth. When the application development takes the driver seat, security stalls the progress by saying NO to many things on the highway. — Is what he says. At that point, my friend Daniel got involved and argued that application security is no longer optional to our business as we rely on apps for our day-to-day activities. And, he added a powerful quote: "Because we've brakes in our cars, we can drive fast" - Robert Garigue Businesses will less likely advance if they don't have security (brakes) to do safely. The car's speed obtains improvement with brakes – the improvements to business are the improvement to th...