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Critical infrastructure attacks are a preferred target for cyber criminals. Here's why and what's being done to protect them. What is Critical Infrastructure and Why is It Attacked? Critical infrastructure is the physical and digital assets, systems and networks that are vital to national security, the economy, public health, or safety. It can be government- or privately-owned. According to Etay Maor, Senior Director Security Strategy at  Cato Networks , "It's interesting to note critical infrastructure doesn't necessarily have to be power plants or electricity. A nation's monetary system or even a global monetary system can be and should be considered a critical infrastructure as well." These qualities make critical infrastructure a preferred target for cyber attacks. If critical infrastructure is disrupted, the impact is significant. In some cases, such cyber attacks on critical infrastructure have become another means of modern warfare. But unlike ...

A joint international law enforcement operation has dismantled Genesis Market, an illegal online marketplace that specialized in the sale of stolen credentials associated with email, bank accounts, and social media platforms. Coinciding with the infrastructure seizure, the major crackdown, which involved authorities from 17 countries, culminated in 119 arrests and 208 property searches in 13 nations. However, the  .onion mirror of the market  appears to be still up and running . The "unprecedented"  law   enforcement   exercise  has been codenamed  Operation Cookie Monster . Genesis Market, since its inception in March 2018, evolved into a major hub for criminal activities, offering access to data stolen from over 1.5 million compromised computers across the world totaling more than 80 million credentials. A majority of infections associated with Genesis Market related malware have been detected in the U.S., Mexico, Germany, Turkey, Sweden, Italy,...

Google is enacting a new data deletion policy for Android apps that allow account creation to also offer users with a setting to delete their accounts in an attempt to provide more transparency and control over their data. "For apps that enable app account creation, developers will soon need to provide an option to initiate account and data deletion from within the app and online," Bethel Otuteye, senior director of product management for Android App Safety,  said . "This web requirement, which you will link in your  Data safety form , is especially important so that a user can request account and data deletion without having to reinstall an app." The goal, the search behemoth said, is to have a "readily discoverable option" to initiate an app account deletion process from both within an app and outside of it. To that end, developers are to provide users with an in-app path as well as a web link resource to request app account deletion and associated...

Portuguese users are being targeted by a new malware codenamed  CryptoClippy  that's capable of stealing cryptocurrency as part of a malvertising campaign. The activity leverages SEO poisoning techniques to entice users searching for "WhatsApp web" to rogue domains hosting the malware, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a new report published today.  CryptoClippy, a C-based executable, is a type of  cryware  known as  clipper   malware  that monitors a victim's clipboard for content matching cryptocurrency addresses and substituting them with a wallet address under the threat actor's control. "The clipper malware uses regular expressions (regexes) to identify what type of cryptocurrency the address pertains to," Unit 42 researchers said. "It then replaces the clipboard entry with a visually similar but adversary-controlled wallet address for the appropriate cryptocurrency. Later, when the victim pastes the address from the clipbo...

An unknown threat actor used a malicious self-extracting archive ( SFX ) file in an attempt to establish persistent backdoor access to a victim's environment, new findings from CrowdStrike show. SFX files are capable of extracting the data contained within them without the need for dedicated software to display the file contents. It achieves this by including a decompressor stub, a piece of code that's executed to unpack the archive. "However, SFX archive files can also contain hidden malicious functionality that may not be immediately visible to the file's recipient, and could be missed by technology-based detections alone," CrowdStrike researcher Jai Minton  said . In the case investigated by the cybersecurity firm, compromised credentials to a system were used to run a legitimate Windows accessibility application called Utility Manager (utilman.exe) and subsequently launch a password-protected SFX file. This, in turn, is made possible by  configuring a de...

A North Korean government-backed threat actor has been linked to attacks targeting government and military personnel, think tanks, policy makers, academics, and researchers in South Korea and the U.S. Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) is  tracking  the cluster under the name  ARCHIPELAGO , which it said is a subset of another threat group tracked by Mandiant under the name  APT43 . The tech giant said it began monitoring the hacking crew in 2012, adding it has "observed the group target individuals with expertise in North Korea policy issues such as sanctions, human rights, and non-proliferation issues." The priorities of APT43, and by extension ARCHIPELAGO, are said to align with North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), the primary foreign intelligence service, suggesting overlaps with a group broadly known as  Kimsuky . "ARCHIPELAGO represents a subset of activity that is commonly known as Kimsuky," Google TAG told The Hacker News. ...

Every year hundreds of millions of malware attacks occur worldwide, and every year businesses deal with the impact of viruses, worms, keyloggers, and ransomware. Malware is a pernicious threat and the biggest driver for businesses to look for cybersecurity solutions.  Naturally, businesses want to find products that will stop malware in its tracks, and so they search for solutions to do that. But  malware protection  alone is not enough, instead what's needed is a more holistic approach. Businesses need to defend against malware entering the network, and then on top of that have systems and processes in place to restrict the damage that malware can do if it infects a user device.  This approach will not only help stop and mitigate the damage from malware, but defend against other types of threats too, such as credential theft as a result of phishing, insider threats, and supply-chain attacks.  Element 1: Malware Protection and Web Filtering The first and mo...

The threat actor behind the information-stealing malware known as  Typhon Reborn  has resurfaced with an updated version (V2) that packs in improved capabilities to evade detection and resist analysis. The new version is offered for sale on the criminal underground for $59 per month, $360 per year, or alternatively, for $540 for a lifetime subscription. "The stealer can harvest and exfiltrate sensitive information and uses the Telegram API to send stolen data to attackers," Cisco Talos researcher Edmund Brumaghin  said  in a Tuesday report. Typhon was  first documented  by Cyble in August 2022, detailing its myriad features, including hijacking clipboard content, capturing screenshots, logging keystrokes, and stealing data from crypto wallet, messaging, FTP, VPN, browser, and gaming apps. Based on another stealer malware called  Prynt Stealer , Typhon is also capable of delivering the XMRig cryptocurrency miner. In November 2022, Palo Alto Network...

Clouded vision CTI systems are confronted with some major issues ranging from the size of the collection networks to their diversity, which ultimately influence the degree of confidence they can put on their signals. Are they fresh enough and sufficiently reliable to avoid any false positives or any poisoning? Do I risk acting on outdated data? This difference is major since a piece of information is just a decision helper, whereas a piece of actionable information can directly be weaponized against an aggressor. If raw data are the hayfields, information is the haystacks, and needles are the actionable signal. To illustrate the collection networks' size & variety point, without naming anyone in particular, let's imagine a large CDN provider. Your role is to deliver, on a massive scale, content over HTTP(s). This attracts a lot of "attention" and signals, but only on the HTTP layer. Also, any smart attacker will probably avoid probing your IP ranges (which are ...