Kartikay Mehrotra reports: Alla Witte’s plans for a new career as a computer programmer included helping clients make enough money to see the world, according to YouTube videos and social media posts. She was in her late 40s with a degree in applied mathematics and an itch to do computer programming. But there was a…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
From QBot…with REvil Ransomware: Initial Attack Exposure of JBS
Vitali Kremez & Yelisey Boguslavskiy write: During the first week of June 2021, two major corporations were attacked by a ransomware group. JBS, the largest meat producer in the world, was hit on May 30, with the attack targeting the North American and Australian IT systems. Fujifilm, a Japanese multinational conglomerate was likely hit between…
FBI and Australian police ran an encrypted chat platform to catch criminal gangs
Catalin Cimpanu reports: The FBI and Australian Federal Police ran an encrypted chat platform and intercepted secret messages between criminal gang members from all over the world for more than three years. Named Operation Ironside (AFP) / Trojan Shield (FBI, Interpol) on Monday, law enforcement agencies from Australia, Europe, and the US conducted house searches and arrested thousands of…
The blurry boundaries between nation-state actors and the cybercrime underground
Intel471 writes: When it comes to attributing malicious cyber activity, there are two buckets by which actors generally fall in: “financially-motivated” or “nation-state.” The former is ultimately interested in money, while the latter is more concerned with obtaining or exploiting sensitive information to gain an advantage over a government or commercial entity. For the past…
Au: Victoria’s child protection department misled watchdogs after sex offender Alex Jones CRISSP data breach
Josie Taylor and ABC Investigations’ Sarah Curnow report: Victorian child protection authorities misled the state’s privacy watchdog during an investigation of a data breach involving a sex offender and dozens of vulnerable children, telling the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner it had contacted all affected children when it had not. The state’s commissioner for…
New Evil Corp ransomware mimics PayloadBin gang to evade US sanctions
Lawrence Abrams reports: The new PayloadBIN ransomware has been attributed to the Evil Corp cybercrime gang, rebranding to evade sanctions imposed by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). The Evil Corp gang, also known as Indrik Spider and the Dridex gang, started as an affiliate for the ZeuS botnet. Over time,…