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In what's a case of setting a thief to catch a thief, the U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) revealed that it has created a network of fake DDoS-for-hire websites to infiltrate the online criminal underground. "All of the NCA-run sites, which have so far been accessed by around several thousand people, have been created to look like they offer the tools and services that enable cyber criminals to execute these attacks," the law enforcement agency  said . "However, after users register, rather than being given access to cyber crime tools, their data is collated by investigators." The effort is part of an ongoing international joint effort called Operation PowerOFF in collaboration with authorities from the U.S., the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Europol aimed at dismantling criminal DDoS-for-hire infrastructures worldwide. DDoS-for-hire (aka "Booter" or "Stresser") services rent out access to a network of infected devices to other crim...

Botnets - a secretly compromised networks of ordinary home and office computers with rogue software or "malware" that are controlled by an individual criminal or a group - has dramatically increased over the past several years and are considered to pose the biggest threat to the Internet. Cyber criminals have brushed-up their hacking skills and are using Botnets as a cyber weapon to carry out multiple crimes like DDoS attacks (distributed denial of service), mass spamming, page rank and advertising revenue manipulation, mining bitcoins, cyber espionage and surveillance etc. 18 BOTNET INFECTIONS PER SECOND According to the director of FBI's cyber division, Joseph Demarest, Botnet has become one of the biggest enemies of the Internet today, and therefore its impact has been significant. Yesterday during a hearing before a U.S. Senate committee, he says that every second 18 computers worldwide are part of botnet armies, which amounts to over 500 million comp...

Google Workspace has quickly become the productivity backbone for businesses worldwide, offering an all-in-one suite with email, cloud storage and collaboration tools. This single-platform approach makes it easy for teams to connect and work efficiently, no matter where they are, enabling seamless digital transformation that's both scalable and adaptable. As companies shift from traditional, on-premises setups focused on device security, to more user-centered, hybrid models, Google Workspace is perfectly positioned to support this evolution. Now, the user account itself is the central hub, allowing access from any device or location — a game changer in today's remote and distributed work environments. However, with all this connectivity and flexibility comes a challenge. Google Workspace connects to countless apps and touches every user in the organization, making it an appealing target for cybercriminals. The platform's internet accessibility opens up additional entry points, raisi...

Military "cyber weaponry" will become commonplace this century, but it will be unlikely to deter attacks by "hacktivists" and criminal gangs, and could easily be used for state-sponsored cyber attacks instead, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development warns. The British authors of the study, which is released today, also caution that "lurid language" and lobbying by technology firms distort the government's plans to protect Britain against cyber attacks. Professor Peter Sommer of the LSE and Dr Ian Brown of Oxford University's internet institute were commissioned by the OECD for one of a series of investigations into potential "future global shocks". Their report comes at a time of heightened awareness of online attacks following hacking protests against companies caught up in the WikiLeaks controversy. In response to other hacking attacks from groups inside China and Russia, military preparations have begun to ga...

Nearly a decade-long cyber espionage group that targeted a variety of Eastern European governments and security-related organizations including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been exposed by a security research firm. The US intelligence firm FireEye released its latest Advanced Persistent Threat ( APT ) report on Tuesday which said that the cyber attacks targeting various organisations would be of the interest to Russia, and " may be " sponsored by the Russian government. The Report entitled " APT28: A Window Into Russia's Cyber Espionage Operations " published by FireEye has " evidence of long-standing, focused operations that indicate a government sponsor - specifically, a government based in Moscow. " " Despite rumours of the Russian government's alleged involvement in high-profile government and military cyber attacks, there has been little hard evidence of any link to cyber espionage, " Dan McWhort...

Imagine… You drive to work in your Smart-Car connected to the GPS automatically, but a hacker breaks into your car's network, takes control of the steering wheel, crashes you into a tree, and BOOM ! Believe it or not, such cyber attacks on smart devices are becoming reality. Car Hacking was recently demonstrated by a pair of security researchers who controlled a Jeep Cherokee remotely from miles away, which shows a rather severe threat to the growing market of the Internet of Things (IoT) . Internet of Things (IoT) — A technology that connects objects to a network or the Internet, and enables interaction among varied devices such as: Smart Cars Smart TVs Refrigerators Wearables Routers Other embedded computing as well as non-computing devices. Few days back, I had read about Smart Dustbins that are the latest smart objects to become Wi-Fi-enabled. Internet of Things to make Cities Smart or Dumb? Cities around the world are becoming...

Is it wrong to hack back in order to counter hacking attack when you have become a victim? — this has been a long time debate. While many countries, including the United States, consider hacking back practices as illegal, many security firms and experts believe it as "a terrible idea" and officially "cautions" victims against it, even if they use it as a part of an active defense strategy. Accessing a system that does not belong to you or distributing code designed to enable unauthorized access to anyone's system is an illegal practice. However, this doesn't mean that this practice is not at all performed. In some cases, retribution is part of current defense offerings, and many security firms do occasionally hack the infrastructure of threat groups to unmask several high-profile malware campaigns. But a new proposed bill intended to amend section 1030 of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that would allow victims of ongoing cyber-attacks to fight ...

Without adequate analysis and algorithms, mass surveillance is not the answer to fighting terrorism and tracking suspects. That's what President Obama had learned last year when he signed the USA Freedom Act , which ends the bulk collection of domestic phone data by US Intelligence Agencies. There is no doubt that US Government is collecting a vast quantity of data from your smartphone to every connected device i.e. Internet of the things , but… Do they have enough capabilities to predict and identify terrorists or cyber criminals or state-sponsored hackers before they act? Well, if they had, I would not be getting chance to write about so many brutal cyber attacks , data breaches, and terrorist attacks that not only threatened Americans but also impacted people worldwide. The Ex-NSA technical director William E. Binney, who served the US National Security Agency for over 30-years, said last year in the front of Parliamentary Joint Committee that forcing analysts t...

New UK Cyber Security Strategy Released The UK's intelligence agency GCHQ will become a main port of call for businesses dealing with cyberattacks, under the government's new cybersecurity strategy revealed on Friday. The Cheltenham-based GCHQ agency will receive huge amount of fund for its larger contribution to UK's cyber-defence, as announced by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude in the The UK Cyber Security Strategy [ PDF ]. The government's eavesdropping centre GCHQ will be offered to private industry to help companies improve their security measures against cyber threats.However, the biggest focus will come in trying to educate and help the public to protect themselves from scams, viruses, criminal attacks and more threats. " To support the implementation of our objectives we have committed new funding of £650m over four years for a transformative National Cyber Security Programme (NCSP) to strengthen the UK's cyber capabilities ," wrote the Mini...

As we are nearing the end of 2022, looking at the most concerning threats of this turbulent year in terms of testing numbers offers a threat-based perspective on what triggers cybersecurity teams to check how vulnerable they are to specific threats. These are the threats that were most tested to validate resilience with the  Cymulate security posture management platform  between January 1st and December 1st, 2022. Manjusaka Date published: August 2022 Reminiscent of Cobalt Strike and Sliver framework (both commercially produced and designed for red teams but misappropriated and misused by threat actors), this emerging attack framework holds the potential to be widely used by malicious actors. Written in Rust and Golang with a User Interface in Simple Chinese (see the workflow diagram below), this software is of Chinese origin. Manjusaka carries Windows and Linux implants in Rust and makes a ready-made C2 server freely available, with the possibility of creating custom im...

China finally admits it has special cyber warfare units — and a lot of them. From years China has been suspected by U.S. and many other countries for carrying out several high-profile cyber attacks, but every time the country strongly denied the claims. However, for the first time the country has admitted that it does have cyber warfare divisions – several of them, in fact. In the latest updated edition of a PLA publication called The Science of Military Strategy , China finally broke its silence and openly talked about its digital spying and network attack capabilities and clearly stated that it has specialized units devoted to wage war on computer networks. An expert on Chinese military strategy at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, Joe McReynolds told TDB that this is the first time when China has explicit acknowledged that it has secretive cyber-warfare units, on both the military as well as civilian-government sides. CHINESE CYBER WARFARE...

The United Kingdom's National Crime Agency (NCA) has arrested 56 suspected hackers in a campaign against cybercrime called "strike week." Law-enforcement officials conducted, in total, 25 separate operations across England, Scotland and Wales, and those arrested were suspected in a wide range of cyber crimes including: Network intrusion and data theft from multinational companies and government agencies Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks Cyber-enabled fraud Malicious software and virus development The raids conducted by NCA were coordinated by its National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU) , special officers Metropolitan Police and Regional Organised Crime Unit's (ROCUs) , associated with local forces around the UK. The arrested hackers also include alleged hackers suspected of being behind attacks on Yahoo, the US Department of Defence (DoD) , and PlayStation. The list of hackers arrested in the operation is given below: A 23-year-old man w...

The new  Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 (CIRCIA)  requires CISA to create rules regarding cyber incident reporting by critical infrastructure organizations. The RFI and hearings precede a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that CISA must publish sooner than  24 months  from the enactment of CIRCIA, which the President signed into law  in March . The sessions and NPRM are steps toward creating the new rule.  CISA is  soliciting expert opinion on what to include  in a report but is taking steps to implement the change soon. Here's what that change means for businesses in the US and what you can do about it now.  Overview of the CISA reporting rule  Owners and operators of critical infrastructure must file cyber incident reports with CISA  within 72 hours . They must report ransom payments for ransomware attacks  within 24 hours . Other businesses can take part voluntarily.  The CISA D...

The US State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced Tuesday a $3 Million reward for the information leading to the direct arrest or conviction of Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev , one of the most wanted hacking suspects accused of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars with his malware. This is the highest bounty U.S. authorities have ever offered in any cyber case in its history. The 30-year-old Russian man who, according to bureau, is an alleged leader of a cyber criminal group who developed the GameOver Zeus botnet . STOLE MORE THAN $100 MILLION Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev, also known under the aliases " lucky12345 ," " Slavik ," and " Pollingsoon, " was the mastermind behind the GameOver Zeus botnet , which was allegedly used by cybercriminals to infect more than 1 Million computers and resulted in more than $100 Million in losses since 2011. GameOver Zeus makes fraudulent transactions from online bank account...

BRUSSELS (AFP) – European computer guards battled Thursday against a simulated attempt by hackers to bring down critical Internet services in the first pan-continental test of cyber defences. All 27 of the European Union's member nations as well as Iceland, Norway and Switzerland took part in the simulation as participants or observers, working together against the fictitious online assault, the European Commission said. The exercise was based on a scenario in which one country after the other increasingly suffered problems accessing the Internet, making it difficult for citizens, businesses and public institutions to access essential services. Security experts had to work together to prevent a simulated "total network crash," said Jonathan Todd, a commission spokesman for digital affairs. "I would like to emphasise, so as to avoid any 'War of the Worlds' scenario here, this is purely an exercise and practice," Todd told a news briefing. "...

FBI's Cyber Division has a new and sharper focus on cyber-intrusion ," You are one click from compromising your network " FBI said. Giving priority to the labeling of suspects follows claims by the Pentagon that the military now has the capability to single out and retaliate against hackers. FBI over the past year has put in place an initiative to uncover and investigate web-based intrusion attacks and develop a cadre of specially trained computer scientists able to extract hackers digital signatures from mountains of malicious code. " A key aim of the Next Generation Cyber Initiative has been to expand our ability to quickly define the attribution piece of a cyber attack to help determine an appropriate response ", said Richard McFeely , executive assistant director of the Bureau's Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch. Investigators can send findings to the FBI Cyber Division's Cyber Watch command, a 24-hour station at headquarters, where sp...

The Police of Finland (aka Poliisi) has formally accused a Chinese nation-state actor tracked as APT31 for orchestrating a cyber attack targeting the country's Parliament in 2020. The intrusion, per the authorities, is said to have occurred between fall 2020 and early 2021. The agency described the ongoing criminal probe as both demanding and time-consuming, involving extensive analysis of a "complex criminal infrastructure." The breach was  first disclosed  in December 2020, with the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service (Supo)  describing  it as a  state-backed cyber espionage operation  designed to penetrate the Parliament's information systems. "The police have previously informed that they are investigating the hacking group APT31's connections with the incident," Poliisi said. "These connections have now been confirmed by the investigation, and the police have also identified one suspect." APT31 , also called Altaire, Bronze Vin...

A 23-year-old Russian national has been indicted in the U.S. and added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Cyber Most Wanted List for his alleged role as the administrator of Marketplace A, a cyber crime forum that sold stolen login credentials, personal information, and credit card data. Igor Dekhtyarchuk , who first appeared in hacker forums in 2013 under the alias "floraby," has been accused of charges of wire fraud, access device fraud, and aggravated identity theft, a set of offenses that could lead to up to 20 years in federal prison. According to the FBI's  Wanted poster , Dekhtyarchuk previously studied at the Ural State University in Yekaterinburg, Russia, and was last known to reside in the city of Kamensk-Uralsky. "Marketplace A specialized in the sale of unlawfully obtained access devices for compromised online payment platforms, retailers, and credit card accounts, including providing the data associated with those accounts such as na...