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Microsoft has disclosed that it's detected a spike in credential-stealing attacks conducted by the Russian state-affiliated hacker group known as Midnight Blizzard. The intrusions, which make use of residential proxy services to obfuscate the source IP address of the attacks, target governments, IT service providers, NGOs, defense, and critical manufacturing sectors, the tech giant's threat intelligence team said. Midnight Blizzard, formerly known as Nobelium , is also tracked under the monikers APT29, Cozy Bear, Iron Hemlock, and The Dukes. The  group , which drew worldwide attention for the SolarWinds supply chain compromise in December 2020, has  continued  to rely on  unseen tooling  in its targeted attacks aimed at foreign ministries and diplomatic entities. It's a sign of how determined they are to keep their operations up and running despite being exposed, which makes them a particularly formidable actor in the espionage area. "These credentia...

A Russian state-sponsored threat actor has been observed targeting diplomatic and government entities as part of a series of phishing campaigns commencing on January 17, 2022. Threat intelligence and incident response firm Mandiant attributed the attacks to a hacking group tracked as APT29 (aka Cozy Bear), with some set of the activities associated with the crew assigned the moniker  Nobelium  (aka UNC2452/2652). "This latest wave of spear phishing showcases APT29's enduring interests in obtaining diplomatic and foreign policy information from governments around the world," Mandiant  said  in a report published last week. The initial access is said to have been aided through spear-phishing emails masquerading as administrative notices, using legitimate but compromised email addresses from other diplomatic entities. These emails contain an HTML dropper attachment called ROOTSAW (aka  EnvyScout ) that, when opened, triggers an infection sequence that deliver...

A China-linked government-sponsored threat actor observed striking European diplomatic entities in March may have been targeting Russian government officials with an updated version of a remote access trojan called  PlugX . Secureworks attributed the attempted intrusions to a threat actor it tracks as Bronze President, and by the wider cybersecurity community under the monikers Mustang Panda, TA416, HoneyMyte, RedDelta, and PKPLUG. "The war in Ukraine has prompted many countries to deploy their cyber capabilities to gain insight about global events, political machinations, and motivations," the cybersecurity firm  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This desire for situational awareness often extends to collecting intelligence from allies and 'friends.'" Bronze President, active since at least July 2018, has a history of conducting espionage operations by leveraging custom and publicly available tools to compromise, maintain long-term access,...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

The U.S. government on Thursday released a cybersecurity advisory outlining multiple intrusion campaigns conducted by state-sponsored Russian cyber actors from 2011 to 2018 that targeted the energy sector in the U.S. and beyond. "The [Federal Security Service] conducted a multi-stage campaign in which they gained remote access to U.S. and international Energy Sector networks, deployed ICS-focused malware, and collected and exfiltrated enterprise and ICS-related data," the U.S. government  said , attributing the attacks to an APT actor known as  Energetic Bear . In addition, the Justice Department  charged  four Russian government employees, including three officers of the Russian Federal Security Service and a computer programmer at the Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics (TsNIIKhM), for their roles in carrying out the attacks on oil refineries, nuclear facilities, and energy companies. The four Russian nationals are Pavel Aleksandro...

An unknown advanced persistent threat (APT) group has been linked to a series of spear-phishing attacks targeting Russian government entities since the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian war in late February 2022. "The campaigns [...] are designed to implant a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that can be used to surveil the computers it infects, and run commands on them remotely," Malwarebytes  said  in a technical report published Tuesday. The cybersecurity company attributed the attacks with low confidence to a Chinese hacking group, citing infrastructure overlaps between the RAT and Sakula Rat malware used by a threat actor known as  Deep Panda . The attack chains, while leveraging different lures over the course of two months, all employed the same malware barring small differences in the source code. The campaign is said to have commenced around February 26, days after Russia's military invasion of Ukraine, with the emails distributing the RAT under the guise of an interac...

A nascent threat actor known as Crypt Ghouls has been linked to a set of cyber attacks targeting Russian businesses and government agencies with ransomware with the twin goals of disrupting business operations and financial gain. "The group under review has a toolkit that includes utilities such as Mimikatz, XenAllPasswordPro, PingCastle, Localtonet, resocks, AnyDesk, PsExec, and others," Kaspersky said . "As the final payload, the group used the well-known ransomware LockBit 3.0 and Babuk." Victims of the malicious attacks span government agencies, as well as mining, energy, finance, and retail companies located in Russia. The Russian cybersecurity vendor said it was able to pinpoint the initial intrusion vector in only two instances, with the threat actors leveraging a contractor's login credentials to connect to the internal systems via VPN. The VPN connections are said to have originated from IP addresses associated with a Russian hosting provider...

2023 CL0P Growth  Emerging in early 2019, CL0P was first introduced as a more advanced version of its predecessor the 'CryptoMix' ransomware, brought about by its owner CL0P ransomware, a cybercrime organisation. Over the years the group remained active with significant campaigns throughout 2020 to 2022. But in 2023 the CL0P ransomware gang took itself to new heights and became one of the most active and successful ransomware organizations in the world.  Capitalizing on countless vulnerabilities and exploits for some of the world's largest organizations. The presumed Russian gang took its name from the Russian word "klop," which translates to "bed bug" and is often written as "CLOP" or "cl0p". Once their victims' files are encrypted, ".clop" extensions are added to their files.  CL0P's Methods & Tactics  The CL0P ransomware gang (closely associated with the TA505. FIN11, and UNC2546 cybercrime groups) was renowned for their extremely destructive and aggressi...

A nascent information-stealing malware sold and distributed on underground Russian underground forums has been written in Rust, signalling a new trend where threat actors are increasingly adopting  exotic programming languages  to bypass security protections, evade analysis, and hamper reverse engineering efforts. Dubbed " Ficker Stealer ," it's notable for being propagated via Trojanized web links and compromised websites, luring in victims to scam landing pages purportedly offering free downloads of  legitimate paid services  like Spotify Music, YouTube Premium, and other Microsoft Store applications. "Ficker is sold and distributed as Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS), via underground Russian online forums," BlackBerry's research and intelligence team said in a report published today. "Its creator, whose alias is @ficker, offers several paid packages, with different levels of subscription fees to use their malicious program." First seen in the wi...

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have risen enormously in past few months and, mostly, they are coming from hacked and insecure internet-connected devices, most commonly known as Internet of Things (IoT). Recent DDoS attack against DNS provider Dyn that brought down a large chunk of the Internet came from hacked and vulnerable IoT devices such as DVRs, security cameras, and smart home appliances. This DDoS was the biggest cyber attack the world has ever seen. Now, in the latest incident, at least five Russian banks have been subject to a swathe of DDoS attacks for two days, said the Russian banking regulator. The state-owned Sberbank was one of the five targets of the attacks that began on last Tuesday afternoon and lasted over the next two days. According to Kaspersky Lab, the longest attack last for 12 hours and peaked at 660,000 requests per second came from a botnet of at least 24,000 hacked devices located in 30 countries. Although the culprit appears ...

The U.K. and U.S. governments on Thursday sanctioned 11 individuals who are alleged to be part of the notorious Russia-based TrickBot cybercrime gang. "Russia has long been a safe haven for cybercriminals, including the TrickBot group," the U.S. Treasury Department  said , adding it has "ties to Russian intelligence services and has targeted the U.S. Government and U.S. companies, including hospitals." The targets of the sanctions are administrators, managers, developers, and coders who are believed to have provided material assistance in its operations. Their names and roles are as follows - Andrey Zhuykov (aka Adam, Defender, and Dif), senior administrator Maksim Sergeevich Galochkin (aka Bentley, Crypt, Manuel, Max17, and Volhvb), software development and testing Maksim Rudenskiy (aka Binman, Buza, and Silver), team lead for coders Mikhail Tsarev (aka Alexander Grachev, Fr*ances, Ivanov Mixail, Mango, Misha Krutysha, Nikita Andreevich Tsarev, and Super Misha), human reso...

Threat actors have been observed distributing malicious payloads such as cryptocurrency miner and clipper malware via SourceForge , a popular software hosting service, under the guise of cracked versions of legitimate applications like Microsoft Office. "One such project, officepackage, on the main website sourceforge.net, appears harmless enough, containing Microsoft Office add-ins copied from a legitimate GitHub project," Kaspersky said in a report published today. "The description and contents of officepackage provided below were also taken from GitHub." While every project created on sourceforge.net gets assigned a "<project>.sourceforge.io" domain name, the Russian cybersecurity company found that the domain for officepackage, "officepackage.sourceforge[.]io," displays a long list of Microsoft Office applications and corresponding links to download them in Russian. On top of that, hovering over the download button reveals a seemi...

The alleged Russian hacker, who was arrested by the Czech police in Prague last October on suspicion of massive 2012 data breach at LinkedIn, can be extradited to either the United States or Russia, a Czech court ruled on Tuesday. Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin , a 29-years-old Russian national, is accused of allegedly hacking not just LinkedIn , but also the online cloud storage platform Dropbox , and now-defunct social-networking company Formspring. However, he has repeatedly denied all accusations. Nikulin was arrested in Prague on October 5 by the Czech police after Interpol issued an international arrest warrant against him. Nikulin appeared at a court hearing held inside a high-security prison in Prague on Tuesday and emaciated after eight months in solitary confinement. The court ruling, pending appeals, left the final decision in the hands of Czech Justice Minister Robert Pelikan, who can approve extradition to one of the countries and block the other. The United ...

A previously unknown threat actor has been observed copying the tradecraft associated with the Kremlin-aligned Gamaredon hacking group in its cyber attacks targeting Russian-speaking entities. The campaign has been attributed to a threat cluster dubbed GamaCopy , which is assessed to share overlaps with another hacking group named Core Werewolf , also tracked as Awaken Likho and PseudoGamaredon. According to the Knownsec 404 Advanced Threat Intelligence team, the attacks leverage content related to military facilities as lures to drop UltraVNC, allowing threat actors to remotely access the compromised hosts. "The TTP (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) of this organization imitates that of the Gamaredon organization which conducts attacks against Ukraine," the company said in a report published last week. The disclosure arrives nearly four months after Kaspersky revealed that Russian government agencies and industrial entities have been the target of Core Werewolf, ...

A former NSA employee has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison for illegally taking a copy of highly classified documents and hacking tools to his home computer between 2010 and 2015, which were later stolen by Russian hackers. Nghia Hoang Pho, 68, of Ellicott City, Maryland—who worked as a developer with Tailored Access Operations (TAO) hacking group at the NSA since April 2006—held various security clearances and had access to national defense and classified information. The personal Windows computer on which Pho stored the classified documents and tools was running Kaspersky antivirus software, which was then allegedly used, one way or another, by Russian hackers to steal the documents in 2015. Though Kaspersky Lab consistently denied any direct involvement in helping Russian intelligence agencies to pilfer sensitive secrets, the United States government banned federal agencies from using Kaspersky antivirus software over spying fears. In response, Kasper...

Anonymous Hackers Targeting Russian government websites for Putin Inauguration Anonymous hackers to launch cyber attacks on the websites of the Russian state agencies to support the opposition. In a YouTube video , Hackers said that the Russian government website will be subjected to DDOS attack on May 6, and on May 7 the same will happen with the prime minister's site. " Join us! All it takes is a few simple actions to bring this rotten and corrupt system to its logical end. " The hackers then posted instructions for everyone who would like to participate in attacks. Putin convincingly won a six-year presidential term in March despite a wave of protests following a December parliamentary poll the opposition said was tarnished by large-scale voting fraud in support of his party. It said it would launch attacks on the Russian government website Government.ru at 1200 GMT on May 6 and on the prime minister's website Premier.gov.ru on May 7 at 0900 GMT. Anonymous...