Kimberly Goody, Jeremy Kennelly, Jaideep Natu, Christopher Glyer write: FireEye is tracking a set of financially-motivated activity referred to as TEMP.MixMaster that involves the interactive deployment of Ryuk ransomware following TrickBot malware infections. These operations have been active since at least December 2017, with a notable uptick in the latter half of 2018, and have…
Category: Of Note
UK hacker “BestBuy” sentenced for Mirai botnet attack on Lonestar
Catalin Cimpanu does some great reporting on the sentencing of “BestBuy:” A UK court sentenced today a 30-year-old man to two years and eight months in prison for using a DDoS botnet to viciously attack and take down internet connectivity in Liberia in the fall of 2016. The man is 30-year-old Daniel Kaye, also known…
Attributions Have Consequences: The Danger of Calling Out Cyberattackers
Leonid Bershidsky reports: The $100 million lawsuit that Mondelez, the maker of Oreos and Cadbury chocolate, has brought against Zurich Insurance Group shows that governments should be more careful about identifying the would-be culprits in putative cyberwars: Such claims can have unintended consequences, and can sometimes harm businesses. […] Mondelez claimed $100 million on its…
“Crafty Cockney,” associate of thedarkoverlord, fighting extradition to the U.S. after being charged with hacking, extorting, U.S. medical entities in 2016
Now THIS is very big news on thedarkoverlord front: Joseph Curtis reports that Nathan Wyatt, who was jailed on fraud charges in the U.K. but has been released from prison there, is now fighting extradition to the U.S. on charges he was involved with hacking and extorting U.S. medical entities as part of thedarkoverlord. This…
CVs containing sensitive info of over 202 million Chinese users left exposed online
Catalin Cimpanu reports on another exposed MongoDB installation found by Bob Diachenko of Hacken Proof: The MongoDB instance contained 854GB of data, with 202,730,434 records in total, most of which were CVs for Chinese users. The resumes contained all the sensitive details you might expect to find on a CV, such as full names, home…
How a Russian firm helped catch an alleged NSA data thief
Fascinating reporting by Kim Zetter on Politico. The 2016 arrest of a former National Security Agency contractor charged with a massive theft of classified data began with an unlikely source: a tip from a Russian cybersecurity firm that the U.S. government has called a threat to the country. Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab turned Harold T. Martin…