Cyber Defense Advisors

News

  • by
  • December 16, 2024

Ukrainian Minors Recruited for Cyber Ops and Reconnaissance in Russian Airstrikes

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU or SSU) has exposed a novel espionage campaign suspected to be orchestrated by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) that involves recruiting Ukrainian minors for criminal activities under the guise of “quest games.” Law enforcement officials said that it detained two FSB agent groups following a special operation in Kharkiv. […]

Cyber News
  • by
  • December 14, 2024

Upcoming Speaking Events

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at a joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, at 7:00 PM ET on Thursday, January 9, 2025. The event will take place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology […]

Cyber News
  • by
  • December 14, 2024

Germany Disrupts BADBOX Malware on 30,000 Devices Using Sinkhole Action

Germany’s Federal Office of Information Security (BSI) has announced that it has disrupted a malware operation called BADBOX that came preloaded on at least 30,000 internet-connected devices sold across the country. In a statement published earlier this week, authorities said they severed the communications between the devices and their command-and-control (C2) servers by sinkholing the […]

Cyber News
  • by
  • December 14, 2024

Thai Officials Targeted in Yokai Backdoor Campaign Using DLL Side-Loading Techniques

Thai government officials have emerged as the target of a new campaign that leverages a technique called DLL side-loading to deliver a previously undocumented backdoor dubbed Yokai. “The target of the threat actors were Thailand officials based on the nature of the lures,” Nikhil Hegde, senior engineer for Netskope’s Security Efficacy team, told The Hacker […]

Cyber News
  • by
  • December 13, 2024

Friday Squid Blogging: Biology and Ecology of the Colossal Squid

Good survey paper. Blog moderation policy.  

Cyber News
  • by
  • December 13, 2024

390,000+ WordPress Credentials Stolen via Malicious GitHub Repository Hosting PoC Exploits

A now-removed GitHub repository that advertised a WordPress tool to publish posts to the online content management system (CMS) is estimated to have enabled the exfiltration of over 390,000 credentials. The malicious activity is part of a broader attack campaign undertaken by a threat actor, dubbed MUT-1244 (where MUT refers to “mysterious unattributed threat”) by […]

Cyber News
  • by
  • December 13, 2024

Critical OpenWrt Vulnerability Exposes Devices to Malicious Firmware Injection

A security flaw has been disclosed in OpenWrt‘s Attended Sysupgrade (ASU) feature that, if successfully exploited, could have been abused to distribute malicious firmware packages. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-54143, carries a CVSS score of 9.3 out of a maximum of 10, indicating critical severity. Flatt Security researcher RyotaK has been credited with discovering and […]

Cyber News
  • by
  • December 13, 2024

Ultralytics Supply-Chain Attack

Last week, we saw a supply-chain attack against the Ultralytics AI library on GitHub. A quick summary: On December 4, a malicious version 8.3.41 of the popular AI library ultralytics ­—which has almost 60 million downloads—was published to the Python Package Index (PyPI) package repository. The package contained downloader code that was downloading the XMRig […]

Cyber News
  • by
  • December 13, 2024

DoJ Indicts 14 North Koreans for $88M IT Worker Fraud Scheme Over Six Years

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has indicted 14 nationals belonging to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) for their alleged involvement in a long-running conspiracy to violate sanctions and commit wire fraud, money laundering, and identity theft by illegally seeking employment in U.S. companies and non-profit organizations. “The conspirators, who […]

Cyber News