Germany seeks to strengthen its cybersecurity collaboration with Israel in light of the recent escalation between Iran and Israel. Initiative “Cyber Dome” includes a German-Israeli cyber research center and expanded cooperation between Israel’s Mossad and Germany’s BND intelligence agency.
The bust of the illegal Cracked and Nulled crime forums evidences the global nature of cybercrime and the impossibility of seeing it as a threat that has no regard for national boundaries.
Although at least 17 million US citizens were victims of the crime forums. law enforcement agencies in the United States, Romania, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Greece were all involved in the bust, according to the US Department of Justice.
The FBI’s most wanted hacker, Mikhail Pavlovich Matveev, dubbed the “Moriarty” of cybercrime, has finally been arrested by Russian authorities. Described by the FBI as a “prolific” cybercriminal, Matveev has had a $10 million bounty on his head for any information leading to his arrest since 2023.
The arrest is a turning point on the part of the Russian authorities, as cybercriminals have long seen Russia as a safe haven. According to intelligence sources, this could either represent an attempt to try and legitimize the Russian economy or an indication that the state is taking back control of cyber-attacks on Western economies.
German authorities have made arrests linked to drug-selling platform Crimenetwork, seizing over $1 million in crypto assets. Crimenetwork is alleged to be the largest darkweb marketplace in the country and enabled users to buy and sell drugs, and offered illicit services such as the forging of documents and trading of stolen data.
The cyber cold war just became a little warmer, with German Intelligence now publicly crying foul on Monday at Russia for online attacks stretching back to 2020.
Germany’s Bundesverfassungsschutz has issued a strong warning against a cyber group belonging to Russian military intelligence (GRU) Unit 29155, which was linked to the 2018 poisonings of a former Russian double agent and his daughter in the UK, claiming that the unit has also been active in carrying out cyberattacks against NATO and EU countries.
By operating a “fraud-as-a-service’ (FaaS) website, BogusBazarr, operating out of China, runs 200 fraudulent webshops and has so far claimed 850,000 victims, mostly from the US and Western Europe.
Victims who access BogusBazarr shops are offered amazing-sounding deals on shoes and apparel from well-known brands. But as the webshops are totally fraudulent, the victims end up having their credit card details stolen with nothing to show for it.
The UK’s Deputy Prime Minister, Oliver Dowden, is expected to formally announce to the press that China is behind a wave of cyber attacks against UK government officials and will urge the protection of voters’ data.
Despite the denial from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the UK government remains on high alert for politically fueled cyber attacks as the election period nears.
Russian hacktivists named Doppelgänger have been interfering in Germany’s elections with a view to influence the outcome of upcoming European elections, according to a report from SentinelLabs and ClearSky Cyber Security.
“Doppelgänger represents an active instrument of information warfare. We anticipate that Doppelgänger’s activities, targeting not only Germany but also other Western countries, will persist and evolve, particularly in light of the major elections scheduled across the EU and the USA in the coming years,” says the report.
U.S. and U.K. authorities announced the seizure of the LockBit ransomware gang’s extortion website.
The “Operation Cronos” campaign was led by the UK’s National Crime Agency, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Europol, in collaboration with a coalition of police agencies from 9 countries globally. However, LockBit posted messages on an encrypted messaging app saying its backup servers were unaffected.
Group-IB discovered a new iOS Trojan named “GoldPickaxe.iOS” that was built to steal facial recognition data from infected iOS devices.
The ‘GoldPickaxe’ Trojan abuses the TestFlight exploit, which sends users innocent URLs that downloads the malware when clicked. According to Group-IB, the stolen biometric data is used to gain unauthorized access to banking accounts.
According to a report by Qrator Labs, blocked IP addresses associated with malicious activity increased by 116% in Q3 2023. The increase in blocked IP addresses is credited to threat actors attempting to bypass geo-blocking.
Top top 5 countries originating these blocked IP addresses consist of the United States (5.66 million), China (4.97 million), Germany (1.39 million), Indonesia (1.32 million), and Singapore (1.03 million).
Security Discovery researchers and the Cybernews team discovered the largest data leak ever recorded, containing 26 billion records predominantly stolen from major social media platforms and government agencies.
Dubbed “The Mother of All Breaches”, the 12 terabytes of compromised records were stolen most notably from Tencent QQ (1.5B), Weibo (504M), MySpace (360M), Twitter (281M), LinkedIn (251M), AdultFriendFinder (220M), among government agency data from the United States, Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Turkey, among others.
Next Wednesday will see the last round in a “King Kong meets Godzilla”-style contest between the European Union and the global technology sector over proposed regulations from Brussels to control AI. The opening rounds have been fought by lawyers, lobbyists, and bureaucrats over the monitoring of foundation model AI services such as GPT-4, access to source codes, fines for disobeying the Brussels rulings, and other related topics.
However, EU member states France, Germany, and Italy are known to be opposed to the EU’s proposed rulings and to favor self-legislation by the technology sector, as opposed to being constrained by hard rules dictated by Brussels. French AI company Mistral and Germany’s Aleph Alpha have criticized the EU’s tiered approach to regulating foundation models, defined as those with more than 45 million users.
The verdict on artificial intelligence (AI) from the real experts is finally in; professional cybercriminal fraternities have judged AI to be “overrated, overhyped and redundant,” according to fresh research from cybersecurity firm Sophos.
It has, hitherto, been accepted wisdom in the cybersecurity industry that cybercriminals, free from any regulatory authority or moral scruples, were among the first to harness the awesome power of AI to create bespoke and virtually unstoppable malware. However, having infiltrated the Dark Web forums where top professional cybercriminals discuss their trade, Sophos reports that the cybercrime sector has thoroughly tested the capabilities of AI and found it wanting.
According to a report by the Identity Theft Resource Center, 42% of small businesses lost revenue due to a cyber attack in 2023.
Despite the record rise of cyber attacks (73%) and revenue loss in small businesses, 85% of small business leaders claim to be prepared for cyber attacks.
Singaporean police have warned Android phone users of a new malware variant that is capable of resetting Android phones to factory settings. Reports say that more than $7.3 million has been lost through threat actors using the malware variant. The malicious code is hidden in social media posts, advertising the sale of different items. It is then downloaded when the applicant clicks on the link to make a payment.
Editorial Team
