Cyber Defense Advisors

News

U.S. Treasury Lifts Tornado Cash Sanctions Amid North Korea Money Laundering Probe

The U.S. Treasury Department has announced that it’s removing sanctions against Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixer service that has been accused of aiding the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group to launder their ill-gotten proceeds. “Based on the Administration’s review of the novel legal and policy issues raised by use of financial sanctions against financial and commercial […]

Cyber News

Friday Squid Blogging: A New Explanation of Squid Camouflage

New research: An associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern University, Deravi’s recently published paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C sheds new light on how squid use organs that essentially function as organic solar cells to help power their camouflage abilities. As usual, you can also use this squid post to […]

Cyber News

Arrests in Tap-to-Pay Scheme Powered by Phishing

Authorities in at least two U.S. states last week independently announced arrests of Chinese nationals accused of perpetrating a novel form of tap-to-pay fraud using mobile devices. Details released by authorities so far indicate the mobile wallets being used by the scammers were created through online phishing scams, and that the accused were relying on […]

Cyber News

My Writings Are in the LibGen AI Training Corpus

The Atlantic has a search tool that allows you to search for specific works in the “LibGen” database of copyrighted works that Meta used to train its AI models. (The rest of the article is behind a paywall, but not the search tool.) It’s impossible to know exactly which parts of LibGen Meta used to […]

Cyber News

UAT-5918 Targets Taiwan’s Critical Infrastructure Using Web Shells and Open-Source Tools

Threat hunters have uncovered a new threat actor named UAT-5918 that has been attacking critical infrastructure entities in Taiwan since at least 2023. “UAT-5918, a threat actor believed to be motivated by establishing long-term access for information theft, uses a combination of web shells and open-sourced tooling to conduct post-compromise activities to establish persistence in […]

Cyber News

Medusa Ransomware Uses Malicious Driver to Disable Anti-Malware with Stolen Certificates

The threat actors behind the Medusa ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation have been observed using a malicious driver dubbed ABYSSWORKER as part of a bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) attack designed to disable anti-malware tools. Elastic Security Labs said it observed a Medusa ransomware attack that delivered the encryptor by means of a loader packed using […]

Cyber News

NCSC Releases Post-Quantum Cryptography Timeline

The UK’s National Computer Security Center (part of GCHQ) released a timeline—also see their blog post—for migration to quantum-computer-resistant cryptography. It even made The Guardian. Tags: cryptography, quantum cryptography, UK Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.  

Cyber News

China-Linked APT Aquatic Panda: 10-Month Campaign, 7 Global Targets, 5 Malware Families

The China-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as Aquatic Panda has been linked to a “global espionage campaign” that took place in 2022 targeting seven organizations. These entities include governments, Catholic charities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and think tanks across Taiwan, Hungary, Turkey, Thailand, France, and the United States. The activity, which took place over […]

Cyber News

10 Critical Network Pentest Findings IT Teams Overlook

After conducting over 10,000 automated internal network penetration tests last year, vPenTest has uncovered a troubling reality that many businesses still have critical security gaps that attackers can easily exploit. Organizations often assume that firewalls, endpoint protection, and SIEMs are enough to keep them secure. But how effective are these defenses when put to the […]

Cyber News