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Hong Kong conducted District Council elections on 24 November 2019.  These local councils handle quality-of-life issues for their constituents, but the elections were seen as a referendum on the anti-Beijing protests that have rocked Hong Kong for several months.  The election results strongly favored pro-democracy forces.  Of the 452 seats contested, 388 were won by pro-democracy candidates and only 62 went to pro-establishment parties.

The clear message that most Hong Kong citizens supported w

Summary

RedXray is cyber threat notification service that simplifies monitoring for organizations and supply chains.  

In 2016, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) commissioned an investigation into reports that the Russian government was sponsoring blood doping of Russian Athletes. Cybersecurity analysts worldwide witnessed cyber-attacks originating from the GRU-linked APT28, better known as “Fancy Bear,” aimed at anti-doping agencies such as the WADA. These attacks were carried out against age

California has recently created a law known as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which will go into effect on January 1, 2020.  Similar to Europe’s GDPR regulations, the act aims to inform consumers about the information being collected about them, while giving them the power to decide how that information is handled.  This law only protects California consumers and exclusive to the following companies:

• Companies with an annual revenue >$25 Million
• Companies which buy, receive, or sell th

Red Sky Alliance information sharing portal provided data about a member falling for a business email compromise (BEC).  Attackers sent a payment request spoofing a well-known local contractor by changing TLD from .COM to .US.  In total, 113 additional domains were registered by the same actors in August-November 2019.

Details

On 26 November 2019, a Red Sky Alliance member shared a fraud report regarding a local construction company email which was spoofed.  The attackers convinced the member’s pr

Red Sky Alliance has recently observed multiple Chinese, state sponsored, Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups targeting Chinese-Muslim non-governmental organizations (NGOs).  Historically, Chinese APT groups have conducted specific cyber campaigns against these type organizations, traditionally with little or no overlap. 

The US Secretary of State (SECSTATE), Mike Pompeo, issued a statement on 26 November 2019 reporting a collection of leaked documents that prove Chinese authorities are eng

By 12 November 2019, hacker Alexei Burkov was extradited from Israel to the US to face major credit card fraud charges.  Originally arrested in 2015 for his role in Cardplanet, his extradition was delayed several times as the Russian government was fighting against his extradition to the US. Israel subsequently received a competing extradition request from Russia.  Then, Russia arrested and sentenced to prison an Israeli/US citizen and offered Israel to exchange her for Burkov.  This case show

China Coverage of Report on the Cyber Vulnerabilities of Asian Ports

SUMMARY

Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has just released a report examining the economic losses expected if Asian port systems, including several in China, were subjected to a major cyber-attack.  This report did not assess the cyber vulnerabilities of Asian ports but rather postulated a major attack in order to calculate economic impact, with a focus on losses in the insurance industry.  The report concluded tha

A reexamination of the academic work published by the Nanjing Military Region First Technical Reconnaissance Bureau showed its primary focus was on network security and computer operations issues.  This suggests that, like some other Tech Recon Bureaus (TRB’s) in the Chinese military, this unit has likely developed a cyber operations mission.

Details about this unit were revealed by searches for its cover designator, the “73610 Unit.”  This element is located in central Nanjing in a large admini

Emotet is a banking malware that emerged in 2014 and has since become a popular malware-as-a-service (MAAS) and a dropper for other types malware. In late September 2019, Emotet returned from a four-month hiatus and was observed in a rash of malicious spam campaigns.[1] The most common delivery mechanism consists of office documents distributed via email.

 TIR-19-309-001.pdf This report examines the Emotet infrastructure and botnet observed in recent weeks. Indicators are available in a companio

From our Asia Desk - China has just opened a new airport near Beijing equipped with facial-recognition systems that let a passenger check in, clear security, and board an aircraft using only their face for identification.  The 5G backbone for this airport system has been built by Huawei Technologies, while the facial-recognition software has been developed by the Chinese companies SenseTime and Yitu Technologies.

This airport technology is a significant benchmark in the Chinese development of ar

TikTok is a popular social media app for sharing short user-created video clips.  TikTok is a youth-oriented app that is used primarily by those in the 16-24 age demographic.  TikTok is hugely popular with about 500 million monthly users worldwide and more than 26 million users in the United States.

The problem is that TikTok is a Chinese social media app, developed in China by a young engineer named Zhang Yiming and the AI development company, ByteDance, that he founded.  TikTok is the internat

On 6 August 2019, the Government of India struck down “Article 370A and 35A” from its constitution.  Article 370 is a constitutional provision that grants special status and allows the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir to make its own laws.  The State of Jammu and Kashmir defined these privileges to include the ability to purchase land and unmovable property, the ability to vote and contest elections, seek government employment and possess other state benefits such as higher education and health

Figure 1. Internet blackout area during Moscow opposition protests 

Governments, especially authoritarian ones, consider cutting the Internet as one of the ways to deal with political opposition and separatists.  Major Internet disruptions were recently detected in India (Kashmir), Indonesia (Papua), Sudan, and, on a smaller scale, in Russia. Severing or completely stopping the Internet becomes more popular, as more rude methods (DDoS, BGP hijacking, or fake certificates) get a stronger push back

SUMMARY

Recent Western analysis has identified a new series of military unit cover designators for the new Chinese military entity called the Strategic Support Force (SSF).  Elements of the SSF have reportedly been assigned cover designators in the series 32001-32099 Unit.  Because the SSF is the parent organization for China’s new cyber force, the Network Systems Department, Wapack Labs has conducted open-source searches for these designators to better define the units’ existence, missions, and

SUMMARY

Recent Western analysis identified a series of Chinese military cover designators, 32001-32099, as belonging to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Strategic Support Force (SSF). Using open-source research targeted on the Chinese internet, Wapack Labs has developed some candidates in this series as components of the Network Systems Department, the new organization for military cyber operations under the SSF.  One probable cyber unit found, using the cover designator PLA 32050 Unit, was id

Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) contractor SyTech lost documents in a cyber breach.  One of the exposed secret Russian projects, dubbed Knockout, is targeting Western media in the US, Great Britain, Germany, France, and other countries.  Knockout maps mass media IT infrastructure, extracts media metadata and collects their vulnerabilities.

 Figure 1. SyTech logo from the leaked Knockout presentation

Details

SyTech/FSB breach materials were exposed in July 2019 and were widely discussed in c

In August 2019, Wapack Labs observed a significant uptick in malicious emails delivering a malware identified as Cryxos.  The observed malware is currently being delivered to users in Brazil, however thousands of related specimens were observed on Virus Total indicating a widespread campaign affecting multiple countries.  This report provides technical details on the first stage and second stage components of this malware campaign as well as the associated infrastructure, and malware attribution

SUMMARY

The recent leakage of millions of resumes from Chinese job sites has provided the opportunity to research, among other things, the work histories and expertise of thousands of Huawei Technologies employees.  Christopher Balding of Fulbright University Vietnam has conducted such a search to determine if Huawei has links to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) or the Ministry of State Security (MSS).  He recently published his conclusion that, “there is an undeniable relationship between Hua

The Department of Homeland Security released a National Terrorism Advisory System

Bulletin on 18 July 2019.

It updates The National Terrorism Advisory System, or NTAS, a tool designed to communicate information about terrorist threats by providing timely, detailed information to the public.  There are now three primary notifications: Bulletins, Elevated Alerts and Imminent Alerts.  NTAS “Bulletins” provide information describing broader or more general trends and current developments regarding t