X-Industry

The New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) is proposing an amendment to its regulations requiring financial services companies to increase their cybersecurity planning reporting and protection.  The Department of Financial Services supervises and regulates the activities of approximately 1,500 banking and other financial institutions with assets totaling more than $2.6 trillion and more than 1,400 insurance companies with more than $4.7 trillion.

Under the proposed amendment, th

Sometimes, good intentioned research can actually benefit adversaries.  Recently when a US-based foreign affairs analyst, received an email from the Director of the “38 North think-tank” to commission an article, it seemed to be business as usual.  The sender was actually a suspected North Korean spy seeking information, according to those involved and three cybersecurity researchers.

Instead of infecting his computer and stealing sensitive data, as hackers typically do, the sender appeared to b

In the era of digitization and ever-changing business needs, the production environment has becomes more attractive.  Multiple functions and teams within an organization can ultimately impact the way an attacker sees the organization's assets, or in other words, the external attack surface.  This dramatically increases the need to define an exposure management strategy.

To keep up with business needs while effectively assessing and managing cybersecurity risk, there are two primary elements that

With the threat of cyber-attacks increasing in the agriculture industry, some farmers differ if there is a need to secure data.  Jason Perdue farms and raises cattle in Eastern Nebraska said, “I don’t understand all of what’s out there and all of the possibility of what is at risk.”  He says he’s more concerned about livestock data than crop information. “I’m probably a little more concerned if something were to happen to our controlling system like the ventilation, feed or water in our livestoc

Activity Summary - Week Ending on 16 December 2022:

• Red Sky Alliance identified 31,927 connections from new IP’s checking in with our Sinkholes
• Frantech[.]ca In Las Vegas hit 14x
• Analysts identified 730 new IP addresses participating in various Botnets
• Cuba Ransomware
• ZeroBot
• Heliconia Exploit
• Sam’s Busted
• Metropolitan Opera
• CA Finance LockBit
• India Fighting on many Fronts
• e-Car Buyers

Link to full report: IR-22-350-001_weekly350.pdf

Red Sky Alliance regularly queries our backend databases, identifying all new data containing Motor Vessel (MV) and Motor Tanker (MT) in the subject line of malicious emails.  Malicious actors use emails with Motor Vessel (MV) or Motor Tanker (MT) in the subject line as a lure to entice users in the maritime industry to open emails containing malicious attachments.  Red Sky Alliance is providing this list of Motor Vessels in which we directly observed the vessel being impersonated, with assoc

The Luna Moth, also known as the Silent Ransom Group, has been active since March 2022 and has extorted hundreds of thousands of dollars from several victims in the legal and retail sectors. The attacks are notable for employing callback phishing or Telephone-oriented attack Delivery (TOAD).

The lure of recent Luna Moth campaigns is a phishing email with an invoice indicating that the recipient’s credit card has been charged for a service, typically under $1,000. The phishing email is personaliz

In November 2022, FortiGuard analysts observed a unique botnet written in the Go language being distributed through IoT vulnerabilities. This botnet, known as Zerobot, contains several modules,  including self-replication,  attacks for different protocols, and self-propagation.  It also communicates with its command-and-control server using the WebSocket protocol.  Based on some IPS signatures trigger count (shown in Figure 1), this campaign started its distribution of the current version someti

Red Sky Alliance utilizes Fortinet collections, analysis, and support; this is important.  A vulnerability has been recently discovered in Fortinet's FortiOS, which could allow for arbitrary code execution.  FortiOS is the Fortinet’s proprietary operation system which is utilized across multiple product lines.  Depending on the privileges associated with the user, an attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.  Users whose acc

Recently, victims of a recently uncovered form of ransomware are being warned not to pay the ransom demand simply because the ransomware is not able to decrypt files it just destroys them instead. Coded in Python, Cryptonite ransomware first appeared in October 2022 as part of a free-to-download open-source toolkit available to anyone with the skills required to deploy it in attacks against Microsoft Windows systems, with phishing attacks believed to be the most common means of delivery.

An anal

Ransomware attacks keep increasing in volume and impact largely due to organizations' weak security controls. Mid-market companies are targeted as they possess a significant amount of valuable data but lack the level of protective controls and staffing of larger organizations. According to a recent RSM survey, 62% of mid-market companies believe they are at risk of ransomware in the next 12 months.

As ransomware is still the preferred way for actors to monetize their access, there is a need to u

A newly discovered web skimming campaign running for the past year has already compromised over 40 e-commerce sites, according to researchers.  The JavaScript protection vendor revealed that “Group X,” which exfiltrated card data to a server in Russia, used a novel supply-chain technique to compromise its victims.  The cyber-criminals exploited a third-party software named Cockpit, a free web marketing and analytics service that was discontinued in December 2014.   Cockpit is a JavaScript librar

The LodaRAT malware has resurfaced with new variants that are being deployed in conjunction with other sophisticated malware, such as RedLine Stealer and Neshta.  The ease of access to its source code makes LodaRAT an attractive tool for any threat actor who is interested in its capabilities.  Aside from being dropped alongside other malware families, LodaRAT has also been observed being delivered through a previously unknown variant of another commodity trojan called Venom RAT, which has been c

Old technology solutions are still in the house.  It could be an old and unsupported storage system or a tape library holding the still-functional backups from over 10 years ago. This is a common scenario with software too. For example, consider an accounting software suite that was extremely expensive when it was purchased. If the vendor eventually went under, then there is no longer any support for the software, which means that the accounting solution only works on some older operating system

Malware is nothing more that burglary tools.  Cyber researchers have recently shed light on a Dark web marketplace called “In the Box” that is designed to specifically cater to mobile malware operators.  The actor behind the criminal storefront, believed to be available since at least January 2020, has been offering over 400 custom web injects grouped by geography that can be purchased by other adversaries looking to mount attacks of their own.  The automation allows other bad actors to create o

Activity Summary - Week Ending on 9 December 2022:

• Red Sky Alliance identified 23,269 connections from new IP’s checking in with our Sinkholes
• Microsoft in Tokyo hit 32x
• Analysts identified 875 new IP addresses participating in various Botnets
• Cryptonite Source Code
• No Way to Recover
• ZeroBot – Top 5 Malware (IR-22-341-001)
• School District Out of Options
• Paris Hospital Hit
• Agrius and Diamonds
• VTB Bank hit with DDoS

Link to full report: IR-22-343-001_weekly343.pdf

The fall of the FTX crypto exchange forced many investors to seriously reconsider their overall approach to investments starting from self-custody to verifying the on-chain existence of funds.  This shift in approach was driven primarily by the lack of trust crypto investors have in the entrepreneurs after being duped by FTX CEO and co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

FTX crashed after Mr. Bankman-Fried and his accomplices were caught secretly reinvesting users’ funds, resulting in the misplacement of

Poor results reflect that (87%) of US defense contractors are failing to meet basic cybersecurity regulation requirements, according to research commissioned by CyberSheath. The survey of 300 US-based Department of Defense (DoD) contractors found that just 13% of respondents have a Supplier Risk Performance System (SPRS) score of 70 or above. Under the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), a score of 110 is required for full compliance.  So, a school grade of “C”, a score of

Cloud computing giant Rackspace, located in San Antonio TX, confirmed earlier this week that a ransomware attack caused a widespread outage that halted email services for thousands of people.  Since last Friday, the company has been dealing with an outage that took down the Microsoft Outlook Web App for thousands of customers and caused other downstream issues. The company runs a lucrative business centered on hosting Microsoft Exchange infrastructure, which offers customers Microsoft email, cal

Back in 1969, the rock group – The Rolling Stones – recorded an album titled “Let it Bleed.” The album sold over 2.4 million copies, and in 1997, it was voted the 27th "Best Album Ever." The current "Bleed You" malicious cyber campaign is far from being popular and is trying to take advantage of a known remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Windows Internet Key Exchange (IKE) Protocol Extensions. More than 1,000 systems are unpatched and vulnerable to compromise.

If an attacker gains cont