Cyber Defense Advisors

Month: March 2024

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  • March 26, 2024

Crafting Shields: Defending Minecraft Servers Against DDoS Attacks

Minecraft, with over 500 million registered users and 166 million monthly players, faces significant risks from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, threatening server functionality, player experience, and the game’s reputation. Despite the prevalence of DDoS attacks on the game, the majority of incidents go unreported, leaving a gap in awareness and protection. This article explains what […]

Cyber News
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  • March 26, 2024

On Secure Voting Systems

Andrew Appel shepherded a public comment—signed by twenty election cybersecurity experts, including myself—on best practices for ballot marking devices and vote tabulation. It was written for the Pennsylvania legislature, but it’s general in nature. From the executive summary: We believe that no system is perfect, with each having trade-offs. Hand-marked and hand-counted ballots remove the […]

Cyber News
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  • March 26, 2024

AI and Trust

Watch the Video on YouTube.com A 15-minute talk by Bruce Schneier.  

Cyber News
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  • March 26, 2024

U.S. Sanctions 3 Cryptocurrency Exchanges for Helping Russia Evade Sanctions

The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned three cryptocurrency exchanges for offering services used to evade economic restrictions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. This includes Bitpapa IC FZC LLC, Crypto Explorer DMCC (AWEX), and Obshchestvo S Ogranichennoy Otvetstvennostyu Tsentr Obrabotki Elektronnykh Platezhey (TOEP). […]

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  • March 26, 2024

CISA Alerts on Active Exploitation of Flaws in Fortinet, Ivanti, and Nice Products

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday placed three security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities added are as follows – CVE-2023-48788 (CVSS score: 9.3) – Fortinet FortiClient EMS SQL Injection Vulnerability CVE-2021-44529 (CVSS score: 9.8) – Ivanti Endpoint Manager Cloud Service Appliance […]

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  • March 25, 2024

Notorious Nemesis Market zapped by video game-loving German police

Nemesis Market, a notorious corner of the darknet beloved by cybercriminals and drug dealers, has been suddenly shut down after German police seized control of its systems. Germany’s Federal Criminal Police (known as the BKA) has announced that it has seized the infrastructure of Nemesis and taken down its website. At the same time, cryptocurrency […]

Cyber News
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  • March 25, 2024

Hackers Hijack GitHub Accounts in Supply Chain Attack Affecting Top-gg and Others

Unidentified adversaries orchestrated a sophisticated attack campaign that has impacted several individual developers as well as the GitHub organization account associated with Top.gg, a Discord bot discovery site. “The threat actors used multiple TTPs in this attack, including account takeover via stolen browser cookies, contributing malicious code with verified commits, setting up a custom Python […]

Cyber News
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  • March 25, 2024

Key Lesson from Microsoft’s Password Spray Hack: Secure Every Account

In January 2024, Microsoft discovered they’d been the victim of a hack orchestrated by Russian-state hackers Midnight Blizzard (sometimes known as Nobelium). The concerning detail about this case is how easy it was to breach the software giant. It wasn’t a highly technical hack that exploited a zero-day vulnerability – the hackers used a simple […]

Cyber News
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  • March 25, 2024

Ransomware: lessons all companies can learn from the British Library attack

Sales: 0845 470 4001 | Support: 0845 230 6001 | Contact Form | NPS Company Security Compliance Cyber Security Ransomware Disaster Recovery Data Protection 3683 Hits In October 2023, the British Library suffered “one of the worst cyber incidents in British history,” as described by Ciaran Martin, ex-CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).  […]

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