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US authorities and security firms have spent the last few weeks pumping out non-stop warnings about an increased threat of Iranian cyber attacks targeting US critical infrastructure. At the time of writing these attacks have not materialised. Given the US has already dropped very real bombs, we think Iran has good reason to avoid escalatory cyber attacks.

Disruptive cyber attacks can be useful because they cause harm and they are also hard to stop or deter. Iranian groups have carried out these kinds of irritating attacks in the past. But there's a caveat. These types of attacks are useful and worthwhile before bickering between states escalates to armed conflict.

Back in December 2023, for example, an Iran-linked group calling itself the Cyber Av3ngers disrupted water facilities across the US by hacking Israeli-made Unitronics programmable logic controllers. These devices are important because they are used to control and monitor operations at water processing plants. Still, in this case, the incidents were annoying rather than destructive or disastrous. 

The US Treasury Department has sanctioned the Aeza Group, a well-known provider of bulletproof web hosting services for malware, disinformation campaigns, and dark web marketplaces.

Sanctions were levied on the main company, three subsidiaries, its three owners, and a fourth high-ranking executive. They cover:

Officials have linked Aeza Group's server infrastructure to the Lumma, Meduza, and RedLine infostealers, the BianLian ransomware, and the BlackSprut dark web drugs marketplace.

Individuals associated with a large cluster of hackers known as Scattered Spider (Muddled Libra, UNC3944) are targeting companies in the aviation and transportation sectors.

The group, which was previously very active in 2023 and had some members arrested in 2024, saw a resurgence in activity this year.

It returned with a bang with attacks that targeted UK retail chains, moved to go after US retailers, and then targeted US insurance businesses before a new change in targets this month.

Phishing gangs are abusing a little-known Microsoft Exchange Online feature to send malicious emails to Microsoft 365 tenants and their employees.

The feature is named Direct Send and allows hardware devices inside a company's network to use the Exchange Online server to send emails. It is typically used by printers and scanners to send scanned documents via email or by phone or video conferencing applications to send invites and reminders to participants.

Direct Send is basically an endpoint that can be accessed via a smart host URL that has the format of tenantname.mail.protection.outlook.com.

A new report from the Atlantic Council suggests the US needs to strengthen its exploit development pipeline if it wants to remain competitive in cyberspace. 

That report, Crash (exploit) and burn, compares how the 0day supply chain approaches differ between China and the United States. 

The author interviewed security researchers, national security and intelligence officials, and senior leaders from offensive hacking and vulnerability research companies in the Five Eyes countries.

Unidentified hackers have breached the systems of a Norwegian dam and opened its water valve at full capacity in an incident this April.

The incident took place at the Lake Risevatnet dam near the city of Svelgen in Southwest Norway.

The valve ran at full capacity for four hours before the unauthorized change was detected.

CoinMarketCap—the go-to website where everyone goes to check cryptocurrency exchange rates—was hacked on Friday.

Hackers exploited a vulnerability in CoinMarketCap's animated logo (see CoinMarketCap's doodle obsession here) to append malicious code that displayed an unauthorized popup.

The popup ran a specialized phishing kit called a "crypto-drainer" that prompted users to connect their crypto-wallet accounts and then stole their funds.

Russian cyber-spies have developed a new social engineering technique designed to extract application-specific passwords from their targets.

Also known as app passwords, or ASPs, these allow attackers to bypass multi-factor authentication and access a victim's Gmail accounts.

App passwords are supported on multiple online platforms, but this campaign specifically targeted Google's ASPs. These are 16-character codes that users manually generate from their Google account security page. They can be copy-pasted inside older apps that don't support Google's more modern 2FA/MFA authentication procedures.

A Minnesota man has allegedly used people-search services to locate, stalk and eventually murder political targets.

The alleged shooter, Vance Boelter, is accused of killing Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark on Saturday night. He is also facing charges for shooting Democratic state senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette earlier that night. Both Hoffman and his wife survived with multiple gunshot wounds. 

According to an FBI affidavit, notebooks containing the names of more than 45 Minnesota state and federal public officials were found in Boelter's abandoned car. One notebook listed 11 different people search services that sell personal information of individuals online,  including physical addresses, emails, and phone numbers. 

Google Chrome is adding a new prompt that will ask for permissions when websites or mobile apps want to connect to a user's localhost or access devices hosted on their internal local network (LAN).

The new prompt is designed to block a rising trend on the internet, where threat actors lure users to malicious sites that access and relay malicious code through their browsers.

This code can contain CSRF (cross-site request forgery) exploits that hack local routers and IoT devices sitting on the same network and abuse them for ad fraud or other types of botnets.