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There are three major elections taking place in 2024: in Taiwan, the United States and Russia. So, what are the chances that we'll see cyber-enabled disruption campaigns targeting each of these polls? In the case of the upcoming US election it seems inevitable.

Election interference techniques take many forms. At the 'lowest' level are information operations on social media that spread disinformation and propaganda. In the context of an election, these types of operations tend to get lost in the noise.

At the 'highest' level of severity there is the possibility of direct interference in the electoral process: messing with the actual votes. In theory, this could shape the outcome of an election, and even unsuccessful attempts undermine the perceived legitimacy of election outcomes.

An audit of 23 of the largest US federal agencies found that most have failed to implement proper event logging and may be unprepared to respond to cybersecurity incidents, especially during the investigation and remediation phase.

Conducted by the US Government and Accountability Office, the report found that 20 of the 23 agencies did not meet a White House executive order mandating they reached a logging level of EL3 by August 2023.

GAO says that only three agencies reached the proper requirement, while 17 were still at EL0 and had not made any headway toward compliance.

ICANN, the non-profit organization that manages domain names and IP addresses, has launched a new service to help law enforcement agencies and cybersecurity professionals obtain redacted and non-public data on domain owners.

Named the Registration Data Request Service (RDRS), the service works as a ticketing system that interconnects investigators with domain registrars—the smaller organizations that manage each TLD domain space.

The new system is designed to create private communication channels where investigators can file requests with domain registrars in a more centralized fashion.

The Black Basta ransomware gang is believed to have made more than $107 million in ransom payments since the group began operations in early 2022.

The number represents payments made by more than 90 victims of the 329 organizations known to have been hit by the gang.

The largest payment was $9 million, while the average ransom payment was $1.2 million, according to joint research published by blockchain tracking company Elliptic and cyber insurance provider Corvus Insurance.

Cyber security firm Huntress has confirmed what organisations like the NSA have been saying — that 'living off the land' is the new normal.

We've covered the shift towards living off the land techniques (abusing legitimate tools already present in the host environment) by both Russian and Chinese APT actors. A new Huntress report focused on threats to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) found more than half of incidents involved LOLbins (living off the land binaries) and were "malware free".

One type of legitimate software that is commonly abused by threat actors to gain and maintain access to targeted environments is remote monitoring and management (RMM) software. Huntress found that 65% of all types of SMB security incidents involved RMM software such as ConnectWise, ScreenConnect, AnyDesk or TeamViewer. These types of software are not detected as malware and their use is often not audited, especially in small organisations.

A phishing platform specialized in cryptocurrency thefts has shut down operations after stealing more than $71 million over the past nine months.

Named Inferno Drainer, the platform launched in February this year.

Spotted by Web3 security platform ScamSniffer, the service allowed threat actors to create phishing pages for more than 220 cryptocurrency brands.

An ENISA report on NIS compliance spending has found that roughly 42% of the EU's critical infrastructure and digital service provider operators have signed up for cyber insurance in 2022.

The report notes that while cyber insurance coverage was at 43% in 2020 and just 30% in 2021, the cyber insurance market now appears to be active and developed all over the EU.

Last year, organizations in all member states signed up for cyber insurance compared to previous years, where most of the coverage was clustered in just a handful of member states.

Internet infrastructure company Fastly will block domain fronting on its cloud platform from February 27, 2024.

Fastly now joins a growing list of major cloud companies that have banned domain fronting. The list includes Amazon (banned in 2018), Google (2018),  Microsoft (2022), and Cloudflare (2015).

Domain fronting is a technique to use different domain names on the same HTTPS connection.

We have removed this item because it largely centres on discussion of an article that is subject to a legal action and is no longer published.

The AlphV ransomware group has filed a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaint against one of its victims for failing to disclose that it had been breached.

In the words of AlphV's submission, the victim company MeridianLink "failed to file the requisite disclosure under Item 1.05 of Form 8-K within the stipulated four business days, as mandated by the new SEC rules".

The Tor Project has removed an estimated 1,000 relay servers from its network, citing their involvement with a for-profit cryptocurrency scheme.

The scheme allegedly promised cryptocurrency tokens for users who set up and ran Tor relays.

In a blog post on Monday, Tor admins said they removed participating servers to protect the integrity and reputation of their project. The removal was subject to a community vote that passed last week.