Cyber Defense Advisors

Year: 2024

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  • June 22, 2024

U.S. Treasury Sanctions 12 Kaspersky Executives Amid Software Ban

The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed sanctions against a dozen individuals serving executive and senior leadership roles at Kaspersky Lab, a day after the Russian company was banned by the Commerce Department. The move “underscores our commitment to ensure the integrity of our cyber domain and to protect […]

Cyber News
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  • June 21, 2024

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Nebula

Beautiful astronomical photo.  

Cyber News
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  • June 21, 2024

Chinese Hackers Deploy SpiceRAT and SugarGh0st in Global Espionage Campaign

A previously undocumented Chinese-speaking threat actor codenamed SneakyChef has been linked to an espionage campaign primarily targeting government entities across Asia and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) with SugarGh0st malware since at least August 2023. “SneakyChef uses lures that are scanned documents of government agencies, most of which are related to various countries’ Ministries […]

Cyber News
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  • June 21, 2024

Military-themed Email Scam Spreads Malware to Infect Pakistani Users

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new phishing campaign that has been identified as targeting people in Pakistan using a custom backdoor. Dubbed PHANTOM#SPIKE by Securonix, the unknown threat actors behind the activity have leveraged military-related phishing documents to activate the infection sequence. “While there are many methods used today to deploy malware, the […]

Cyber News
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  • June 21, 2024

Ross Anderson’s Memorial Service

The memorial service for Ross Anderson will be held on Saturday, at 2:00 PM BST. People can attend remotely on Zoom. (The passcode is “L3954FrrEF”.) Tags: cryptography, security engineering Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.  

Cyber News
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  • June 21, 2024

How to Use Tines’s SOC Automation Capability Matrix

Created by John Tuckner and the team at automation and AI-powered workflow platform Tines, the SOC Automation Capability Matrix (SOC ACM) is a set of techniques designed to help security operations teams understand their automation capabilities and respond more effectively to incidents. A customizable, vendor-agnostic tool featuring lists of automation opportunities, it’s been shared and […]

Cyber News
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  • June 21, 2024

Oyster Backdoor Spreading via Trojanized Popular Software Downloads

A malvertising campaign is leveraging trojanized installers for popular software such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Teams to drop a backdoor called Oyster (aka Broomstick and CleanUpLoader). That’s according to findings from Rapid7, which identified lookalike websites hosting the malicious payloads that users are redirected to after searching for them on search engines like Google […]

Cyber News
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  • June 21, 2024

SolarWinds Serv-U Vulnerability Under Active Attack – Patch Immediately

A recently patched high-severity flaw impacting SolarWinds Serv-U file transfer software is being actively exploited by malicious actors in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-28995 (CVSS score: 8.6), concerns a directory transversal bug that could allow attackers to read sensitive files on the host machine. Affecting all versions of the software prior to and […]

Cyber News
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  • June 21, 2024

U.S. Bans Kaspersky Software, Citing National Security Risks

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) on Thursday announced a “first of its kind” ban that prohibits Kaspersky Lab’s U.S. subsidiary from directly or indirectly offering its security software in the country. The blockade also extends to the cybersecurity company’s affiliates, subsidiaries and parent companies, the department said, adding the […]

Cyber News