Cyber Defense Advisors

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  • October 13, 2024

OilRig Exploits Windows Kernel Flaw in Espionage Campaign Targeting UAE and Gulf

The Iranian threat actor known as OilRig has been observed exploiting a now-patched privilege escalation flaw impacting the Windows Kernel as part of a cyber espionage campaign targeting the U.A.E. and the broader Gulf region. “The group utilizes sophisticated tactics that include deploying a backdoor that leverages Microsoft Exchange servers for credentials theft, and exploiting […]

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  • October 12, 2024

FBI Creates Fake Cryptocurrency to Expose Widespread Crypto Market Manipulation

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has announced arrests and charges against several individuals and entities in connection with allegedly manipulating digital asset markets as part of a widespread fraud operation. The law enforcement action – codenamed Operation Token Mirrors – is the result of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) taking the “unprecedented […]

Cyber News
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  • October 11, 2024

Indian Fishermen Are Catching Less Squid

Fishermen in Tamil Nadu are reporting smaller catches of squid. Blog moderation policy.  

Cyber News
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  • October 11, 2024

More on My AI and Democracy Book

In July, I wrote about my new book project on AI and democracy, to be published by MIT Press in fall 2025. My co-author and collaborator Nathan Sanders and I are hard at work writing. At this point, we would like feedback on titles. Here are four possibilities: Rewiring the Republic: How AI Will Transform […]

Cyber News
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  • October 11, 2024

GitHub, Telegram Bots, and ASCII QR Codes Abused in New Wave of Phishing Attacks

A new tax-themed malware campaign targeting insurance and finance sectors has been observed leveraging GitHub links in phishing email messages as a way to bypass security measures and deliver Remcos RAT, indicating that the method is gaining traction among threat actors. “In this campaign, legitimate repositories such as the open-source tax filing software, UsTaxes, HMRC, […]

Cyber News
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  • October 11, 2024

IronNet Has Shut Down

After retiring in 2014 from an uncharacteristically long tenure running the NSA (and US CyberCommand), Keith Alexander founded a cybersecurity company called IronNet. At the time, he claimed that it was based on IP he developed on his own time while still in the military. That always troubled me. Whatever ideas he had, they were […]

Cyber News
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  • October 11, 2024

How Hybrid Password Attacks Work and How to Defend Against Them

Threat actors constantly change tactics to bypass cybersecurity measures, developing innovative methods to steal user credentials. Hybrid password attacks merge multiple cracking techniques to amplify their effectiveness. These combined approaches exploit the strengths of various methods, accelerating the password-cracking process. In this post, we’ll explore hybrid attacks — what they are and the most common […]

Cyber News
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  • October 11, 2024

CISA Warns of Threat Actors Exploiting F5 BIG-IP Cookies for Network Reconnaissance

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning that it has observed threat actors leveraging unencrypted persistent cookies managed by the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) module to conduct reconnaissance of target networks. It said the module is being used to enumerate other non-internet-facing devices on the network. The agency, however, did […]

Cyber News
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  • October 11, 2024

New Critical GitLab Vulnerability Could Allow Arbitrary CI/CD Pipeline Execution

GitLab has released security updates for Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) to address eight security flaws, including a critical bug that could allow running Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines on arbitrary branches. Tracked as CVE-2024-9164, the vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 9.6 out of 10. “An issue was discovered in […]

Cyber News