Chinese authorities have arrested alleged hackers in what appears to be the first-ever reported case of hackers using AI to develop ransomware. These alleged hackers reportedly used ChatGPT to refine the code for their home-grown ransomware encryption tool. ChatGPT has been banned in China in favor of Chinese tools such as Baidu’s Ernie Bot. However
Hackers
Iranian-Linked Hackers Attack Water Facility in Pennsylvania
It is being reported that U.S. officials are investigating an attack by hackers “linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), also known as the “Cyber Av3ngers,” that allowed them to gain control of a device at the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, PA. The water authority has stated that once the intrusion was detected…
Privacy Tip #361 – Beware of ChatGPT-Themed Scams
Researchers at Meta, the owner of Facebook, released a report this week which indicated that since March 2023, Meta “has blocked and shared with our industry peers more than 1,000 malicious links from being shared across our technologies” of unique ChatGPT-themed web addresses designed to deliver malicious software to users’ devices.
According to Meta’s report…
Privacy Tip #358 – Bank Failures Give Hackers New Strategy for Attacks
Hackers are always looking for the next opportunity to launch attacks against unsuspecting victims. According to Cybersecurity Dive, researchers at Proofpoint recently observed “a phishing campaign designed to exploit the banking crisis with messages impersonating several cryptocurrencies.”
According to Cybersecurity Dive, cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf has observed “an uptick in newly registered domains related…
Chinese-Based Hackers Alleged to Have Stolen $20M in COVID-19 Relief Fraud Schemes
According to NBC News and Reuters, the United States Secret Service confirmed that hackers from APT41, a criminal cyber-hacking group linked to the Chinese Communist Party, stole “at least $20 million in U.S. Covid Relief benefits, including Small Business Administration loans and unemployment insurance funds in over a dozen states.”
According to the report…
Hackers Caused a Traffic Jam in Moscow
Hackers caused a massive traffic jam in Moscow by exploiting the ride-sharing app Yandex Taxi and using it to summon dozens of taxis to a single location. While Yandex has not confirmed the attacker’s identity, the hacktivist group Anonymous claimed responsibility on Twitter. The group has been actively taking aim at Russian targets in response…
Hackers Target Russia in Support Of Ukraine
The world has rallied around Ukraine since Russian forces invaded this past week, including, it seems, hackers. The hacktivist collective Anonymous, which gained prominence between 2008 and 2014 with a series of high-profile politically motivated cyber-attacks against such disparate groups as the Church of Scientology and PayPal, has come out of the woodwork once again…
Update on Apache log4j and Kronos Security Incidents
It was a crazy weekend for cyber-attacks. People seem surprised, but those of us in the industry aren’t surprised one bit. It is very logical and foreseeable that hackers are leveraging attacks that have maximum disruption on multiple victims, including third-party vendors and their customers. It is a “one-stop shop” strategy that is used every…
Homeland Security Announces “Hack DHS” Program
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a “bug bounty” program on December 14, 2021, called “Hack DHS.” Yes, you read that right. DHS is actually going to invite select cybersecurity “hackers” to try to hack into its systems. DHS created the program to “identify potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities within certain DHS systems and increase the…
Class Action Against Shopify Dismissed for Lack of Jurisdiction
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed a consumer class action against Ledger SAS’s e-commerce vendor Shopify Inc. because of its locale – Shopify is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. Judge Edward M. Chen said in his decision earlier this week that the plaintiffs failed to satisfy their burden to demonstrate that…