X-Industry

A victim of a ransomware attack paid to restore access to their network, but the cybercriminals did not hold up their end of the deal.  The real-life incident, as detailed by cybersecurity researchers at Barracuda Networks, occurred in August 2021, when hackers from the BlackMatter ransomware group used a phishing email to compromise a single victim's account at an undisclosed company.  First seen in July 2021, BlackMatter is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) tool that allows the ransomware's dev

Security researchers have warned that countless global organizations might be at risk of remote compromise after discovering more than 8000 exposed Virtual Network Computing (VNC) instances. Virtual networking enables communication between multiple computers, virtual machines (VMs), virtual servers, or other devices across different office and data center locations. While physical networking connects computers through cabling and other hardware, virtual networking extends these capabilities by u

The Agency for National Security, ANB, said on Friday that Russian services have organized coordinated cyber-attacks on Montenegrin government servers twice since 22 August 2022.  The ANB told media that Montenegro is in what it called a hybrid war at the moment.  “Coordinated Russian services are behind the cyber-attack. This kind of attack was carried out for the first time in Montenegro, and it has been prepared for a long period of time,” the ANB told media.

On 22 August, the government repo

They say, “Ya gotta Play, to Win.”  Many state lotteries are now online through the Internet.  But in New Hampshire, playing the lottery on the Internet could be hazardous.  Clicking unknown pop-ups on the Internet is never a good idea and it wasn’t in NH this past Friday. 

The New Hampshire Lottery website is back in service after the agency faced a cyber-attack on 26 August that attempted to trick users into clicking a pop-up and downloading malware.  “The (cyber) attack resulted in the creati

‘AI cannot be an excuse’: What happens when Meta’s chatbot brands a college professor a terrorist?  Chatbots can often be wrong.  Is there any recourse?

Marietje Schaake has had a long and distinguished career.  She has been an advisor to the US ambassador to the Netherlands and consulted with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.   For 10 years, she was a member of the European Parliament, crafting laws that covered hundreds of millions of people, focusing specifically on digital freedoms.  Sh

Siemens Executive Summary:  It is increasingly important to incorporate safety systems into vehicles.  With advancements in vehicle electrification and autonomous vehicles (AV), the automotive industry is undergoing a transition that is safer and more environmentally friendly.  This white paper discusses the transitions occurring in the automotive industry and what considerations for integrated safety system designs are relevant today or are expected to gain relevance in the coming years.  The r

The Newcomer’s Guide to Cyber Threat Actor Naming (original article from 2018)

I was driven by a deep frustration when I started my public “APT Groups and Operations” spreadsheet in 2015.  I couldn’t understand why I had to handle so many different names for the same threat actor.  Today (2018), I understand the reasons for the different names and would like to explain to them so newcomers stop asking for standardization. Off the record: you just reveal a lack of insight by demanding complete st

Activity Summary - Week Ending on 26 August 2022:

• Red Sky Alliance identified 30,967 connections from new IP’s checking in with our Sinkholes
• Microsoft hit
• Analysts identified 2,019 new IP addresses participating in various Botnets
• DarkyLock, Gwisin, vvyu, Kriptor
• Cuba Ransomware
• DiDi Chinese Ride Share
• India hit Hard
• Psychology and Cyber Security
• LockBit in France
• Center Hospital Sud Francilien & La Poste Mobile Hit

Link to full report: IR-22-238-001_weekly238.pdf

Benjamin Franklin had it right so many years ago: “An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound in Cure.”  An ounce of prevention in cyber security is now a requirement.  Due to the number of cybersecurity firms that have entered the market in recent years, it is evident that all industries are reaching a level of heightened anxiety.  Some organizations are on alert because they know their networks have already been targeted by state-sponsored hackers, others know their executives are being targeted

A security awareness and training program is a critical element of any organization. It is how we can distribute security information in the workforce. By establishing and maintaining a robust security awareness and training program we can provide the workforce with the information and tools, they need to protect the organization's vital information. In this aspect, all users have information security responsibilities.

It is not unusual for organizations to treat awareness and training as two se

Since 2018, Proofpoint researchers have tracked a financially-motivated cybercrime actor, TA558, targeting hospitality, travel, and related industries located in Latin America and sometimes North America, and western Europe.  The actor sends malicious emails written in Portuguese, Spanish, and sometimes English.  The emails use reservation-themed lures with business-relevant themes such as hotel room bookings.  The emails may contain malicious attachments or URLs aiming to distribute one of at l

Pen testing and vulnerability scanning are often confused for the same service.  The problem is business owners often use one when they really need the other.  People frequently confuse penetration testing and vulnerability scanning.  Both services look for weaknesses in your IT infrastructure by exploring your systems the same way an actual hacker would.

Penetration testing is a manual security assessment where cyber security professional attempts to find a way to break into your systems.  It's

Back in 1968, the Rolling Stones came out with a song titled, “Sympathy for the Devil.”  The lyrics try to offer sympathy for a demon.  So, the following story of a kid hacker tries to offer some sympathy for a criminal hacker.  As one of Britain’s most notorious cyber criminals, Daniel Kelley played a leading role in the 2015 TalkTalk data breach. The hack was catastrophic for the telecoms firm, resulting in a financial loss of £77 million (€90.7 million) and the stolen data of over 150,000 cus

Tesla is set to unveil a new humanoid robot, Optimus, in late September 2022.  There has been a lot of speculation surrounding Tesla's strategy in entering the robotics market, and a recent post by Elon Musk sheds some new light.

In the post, published in China's Cyberspace Administration's official publication, Musk continued to make the point underlined since announcing the Tesla Bot project in 2021: That Tesla, because of its major investments in autonomous driving, is arguably the biggest ro

Google Cloud has claimed to have blocked the largest Layer 7 (HTTPS) DDoS attack to date after a Cloud Armor customer was targeted by a series of attacks that peaked at 46 million requests per second (rps).  Google explained the attack, which occurred on 1 June 2022, was at least 76% larger than the previously reported HTTPS DDoS record and showed characteristics that link it to the Mēris attack family.

Google said its Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection was able to detect and analyze the traffic ea

FortiGuard Labs researchers have been tracking a quickly evolving IoT malware family known as “RapperBot” since mid-June 2022.  This family borrows heavily from the original Mirai source code, but what separates it from other IoT malware families is its built-in capability to brute force credentials and gain access to SSH servers instead of Telnet as implemented in Mirai.  In addition, recent samples show that its developers have started adding code to maintain persistence, which is rarely done

The Ukrainian energy agency responsible for the oversight and safe operation of the nation’s nuclear power plants said earlier this week that Russian hackers had launched their most ambitious effort yet on the company’s official website.  The attack appeared to fail and there was no indication that it threatened to disrupt the Ukrainian power grid or the company’s oversight of the nation’s 15 working  nuclear reactors.

The company, Energoatom,[1] said it had managed to keep the attack from being

Activity Summary - Week Ending on 19 August 2022:

• Red Sky Alliance identified 23,756 connections from new IP’s checking in with our Sinkholes
• com x18
• Analysts identified 2,529 new IP addresses participating in various Botnets
• Redeemer, Beamed, and Araicrypt
• Mars Stealer
• Chinese Porn
• DSE
• Lapsus$ Group
• Seaborgium and NATO
• Bitter APT & APT36

Link to full report: IR-22-231-001_weekly231.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

We do not recommend this, but if you happened to be sneaking onto Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in late July 2022, you would have had a short visit.  Space Force conducted a demonstration where two robot dogs, built by Ghost Robotics, conducted patrols in advance of potential broader adoption of the platforms for critical perimeter security. The robot dogs are known as Vision 60 Q-UGVs, for quadruped unmanned ground vehicles. Bearing more than a passing similarity to Boston Dynamics' quadru