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The US Department of Justice unsealed charges on Tuesday against a major figure in the ransomware underground, a Ukrainian national who was involved in or managed at least seven ransomware platforms.

The charging documents identify Volodymyr Viktorovich Tymoshchuk as the administrator of the LockerGoga, MegaCortex, and Nefilim ransomware operations.

From his role, he coordinated or was involved in the hacks and extortions of more than 250 US organizations, and hundreds more around the world.

Kazakhstan's state-owned oil and gas company KazMunayGas has dismissed a report about a new cyber-espionage group targeting its employees as a planned phishing test.

Published by Indian security firm Seqrite, the report claimed that a new suspected Russian APT group named NoisyBear was targeting Kazakhstan's oil and gas sector.

The report said the hackers used malicious ZIP and LNK files to deploy PowerSploit, a well-known PowerShell-based post-exploitation framework, which also happens to be very popular with pen-testers.

Google has released version 140 of its Chrome browser this week, with support for a new security feature designed to protect server-set cookies from client-side tampering.

The new feature is a cookie prefix, a piece of text added before the names of a browser's cookie files.

Cookie prefixes are different from cookie headers and, in the words of security firm ERNW, are a lesser-known browser security feature that is rarely used by web developers.

Google has announced it is starting a cyber "disruption unit" that will seek out opportunities to proactively disrupt threat actor campaigns. This move reflects increased industry and government appetite for more aggressive private sector approaches and also indicates a sensible incremental step towards government-endorsed private sector hacking. 

Per CyberScoop's coverage:

Google has already been involved in the court-endorsed botnet takedowns of Glupteba in 2021 and BadBox 2.0 in July. To put this in perspective, Microsoft pioneered court-ordered disruption operations way back in 2010 and has been involved in a string of takedowns since then. 

Two YouTube channels named Scammer Payback and Trilogy Media played a crucial role in unmasking and identifying members of a giant scam network that stole more than $65 million from US seniors.

The US Department of Justice used videos posted by the two channels in 2020 and 2021 to identify and then track down the network. Officials arrested 25 of the 28 suspects they identified during this investigation.

The group allegedly used call centers based in India to call US seniors, posing as government officials, bank employees, and tech support agents.

DHS head Kristi Noem has fired 24 employees of the FEMA IT department, citing an alleged data breach and a string of cybersecurity failures.

The firings included FEMA CIO Charles Armstrong and FEMA CISO Gregory Edwards.

Noem claims the DHS discovered a breach of FEMA systems and stopped it before any data was stolen.

A novel supply chain attack has hit the users of NX, a popular developer tool used to automate and optimize CI/CD pipelines.

The incident took place on Tuesday, after a threat actor compromised the npm token for one of the NX developers, and then released malicious updates for several NX tools to the npm package repository.

The new versions contained a malicious script that:

Private sector cyber operators in the United States would be allowed to hack foreign cybercrime enterprises that target American citizens and infrastructure under new legislation being proposed by US Congressman David Schweikert (R). The legislation won't pass in its current form, but we like the idea of US private sector hacking capacity being let loose in some circumstances.

The Scam Farms Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act riffs on old-time letters of marque and reprisal. These were government licenses that authorised private operators (privateers) to attack and capture sailing vessels and goods from specified foreign states. Letters of marque were last issued by the US in 1815.

Since at least 2013, cyber letters of marque have regularly been suggested as a policy response to deal with rampant cybercrime and espionage. If we can't defend ourselves, let's make ourselves feel better by hacking back!

The US Federal Communications Commission has banned more than 1,200 voice service providers from the US telephone network after they failed to deploy robocall protections.

The number is almost half of the 2,411 voice providers the agency notified and ordered last year to become compliant with its new anti-robocall rules.

Voice providers had to deploy the STIR/SHAKEN protocol, provide accurate registration and ownership details, and a contact for reporting robocall abuse and issues.

For the second time this year, an Iranian hacktivist group has crippled the satellite communications systems on 64 Iranian ships at sea.

The incident took place last week and impacted 39 oil tankers and 25 cargo ships operated by the National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) and the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL).

The hack didn't target the ships directly, but Fannava, an Iranian tech company that provides satellite communication terminals for the ships.