The U.S. National Security Agency on Thursday warned government partners and private companies about a Russian hacking operation that uses a special intrusion technique to target operating systems often used by industrial firms to manage computer infrastructure. Reuters reports: “This is a vulnerability that is being actively exploited, that’s why we’re bringing this notification out,” said Doug Cress, chief of the…
Tag: espionage
Cold War Satellites Inadvertently Tracked Species Declines
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit in 1957, the United States responded with its own spy satellites. The espionage program, known as Corona, sought to locate Soviet missile sites, but its Google Earth-like photography captured something unintended: snapshots of animals and their habitats frozen in time. Now, by comparing these images with…
Elite Hackers Target WHO As Coronavirus Cyberattacks Spike
According to Reuters, elite hackers tried to break into the World Health Organization earlier this month. While the effort was unsuccessful, the agency said there’s been a more than two-fold increase in cyberattacks as they battle to contain the coronavirus. From the report: The attempted break-in at the WHO was first flagged to Reuters by Alexander Urbelis, a cybersecurity expert and…
Twitter Locks WikiLeaks Official Account With 5.4 Million Followers, Days Before Julian Assange’s Extradition Hearing
Days before Julian Assange’s extradition hearings are set to continue, WikiLeaks’ journalist Kristin Hrafnsson reports that the official WikiLeaks twitter account has been locked. “All attempts to get it reopened via regular channels have been unsuccessful,” writes Hrafnsson in a tweet. “It has been impossible to reach a human at twitter to resolve the issue. Can someone fix this?” RT reports:…
Ex-CIA Engineer Set To Go On Trial For Vault 7 Leak
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Manhattan federal prosecutors are poised to open their case Tuesday in the trial of a former software engineer for the Central Intelligence Agency who is charged with handing over a trove of classified information on the spy agency’s hacking operations to WikiLeaks (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). In 2017, WikiLeaks released more than…
Should Huawei Just Abandon Android?
Due to a U.S. government ban on sales to Huawei, Google revoked its license for popular apps last spring (including Gmail and the Play Store). But this week Huawei executive Fred Wangfei suggested that even if that ban is lifted, Huawei would continue developing its own app ecosystem instead to avoid the possibility of future political complications. The vice president of…
Hackers Acting in Turkey’s Interests Believed To Be Behind Recent Cyberattacks
Sweeping cyberattacks targeting governments and other organizations in Europe and the Middle East are believed to be the work of hackers acting in the interests of the Turkish government, Reuters reported Monday, citing three senior Western security officials said. From the report: The hackers have attacked at least 30 organizations, including government ministries, embassies and security services as well as companies…
Trend Micro Set Up a Fake Tech Company and Honeypot To Study Cyber Criminals
DesScorp writes: In an effort to better understand the latest threats to IT systems, antivirus and security company Trend Micro created a fake tech company, complete with AI-generated photos of fake employees, in order to build a honeypot environment that looked like an actual, working tech factory environment. “Malicious hackers are targeting factories and industrial environments with a wide variety of…
Major US Companies Breached, Robbed, and Spied on by Chinese Hackers
Rob Barry and Dustin Volz, reporting for Wall Street Journal: The hackers seemed to be everywhere. In one of the largest-ever corporate espionage efforts, cyberattackers alleged to be working for China’s intelligence services stole volumes of intellectual property, security clearance details and other records from scores of companies over the past several years. They got access to systems with prospecting secrets…
Vast Dragnet Targets Theft of Biomedical Secrets For China
schwit1 shares a report from The New York Times: The N.I.H. and the F.B.I. have begun a vast effort to root out scientists who they say are stealing biomedical research for other countries from institutions across the United States. Almost all of the incidents they uncovered and that are under investigation involve scientists of Chinese descent, including naturalized American citizens, allegedly…