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This week the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) levied nearly USD$200m in fines against the country's largest mobile telecommunications providers for selling customers' location data  without their consent.

The FCC says each of the telcos involved—Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile—sold customer location data to aggregators despite a 2007 regulation that required them to obtain consent from customers to do so. The aggregators then resold the data to third-party location-based service providers. In one example, aggregators shared AT&T customer location data with 88 third party entities directly or indirectly. They shared location data from other telcos with similar numbers of third parties. 

Some carriers argue they shouldn't be fined because they discontinued the practice in 2019. This is an appealing argument at first glance, but the FCC started these investigations  after a 2018 New York Times article showed the data was being abused by a Missouri sheriff. We're not sure companies should be let off the hook just because they stop a troubling practice when it receives unwelcome public attention. 

Academics, security, and privacy researchers have proposed a new standard for the management of privacy policies and consumer rights.

The new standard is named privacy.txt and was inspired by similar solutions like robots.txt, security.txt, and ads.txt.

Just like the aforementioned, it is designed to be hosted in a website's root (/) or "/.well-known" directory and provide instructions to both users and automated systems about a company's privacy policies and user data controls.

Belarusian hacktivist group the Cyber Partisans claims to have hacked Belarus' national intelligence agency, the Belarusian KGB.

The group says it breached the agency in the fall of 2023 and exfiltrated data from its official website.

The intrusion went undetected for months until earlier this year, when the KGB put its website into maintenance mode—in which it remained to this day.

A suspected state-backed hacking group is exploiting two zero-days in Cisco ASA security appliances as part of a campaign targeting government networks globally.

Cisco confirmed the attacks earlier this week when it also released patches for the two zero-days.

The company linked the attacks to a group it tracks as UAT4356. Cisco says the group has also targeted perimeter network devices from other vendors, as well as Microsoft Exchange email servers.

Russian military intelligence hacking unit Sandworm presents a cyber proliferation risk with its more sensational operations potentially inspiring or acting as a rough blueprint for other actors, Google’s Mandiant unit has warned.

Google's Mandiant recently released a report examining Sandworm, perhaps the world's most notorious state-sponsored group. The report is a useful primer on the most significant Russian cyber activities associated with the country's invasion of Ukraine.

Sandworm, which Mandiant has now dubbed APT44, has been around since 2009 and the US and UK governments formally attribute the group to Unit 74455 of the GRU, Russian military intelligence.  

The US government has imposed entry visa restrictions on 13 individuals involved in the development and sale of commercial spyware.

The visa ban applies to the 13 individuals and their immediate family members, such as spouses and children.

The State Department has not released their names. Sources have told RiskyBiz the names would not be made public due to US laws.

An unidentified threat actor is exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in CrushFTP, an enterprise file-transfer software solution.

CrushFTP released a patch on Friday, hours after it learned of the attacks from the Airbus CERT team. CrowdStrike also confirmed the zero-day later in the day and described the attacks as "targeted."

The zero-day was assigned CVE-2024-4040.

Law enforcement agencies from 19 countries have collaborated to take down a cybercrime service named LabHost that provided tools to easily set up and run phishing pages.

The service launched in late 2021 and was what you would call a PhaaS, or Phishing-as-a-Service platform.

For prices of $179/month and higher, it allowed threat actors to use templates and set up phishing sites imitating a legitimate service.

The foundations for open source software security (OpenSSF) and for the promotion of JavaScript (OpenJS) have jointly warned the takeover of the XZ Utils project (a likely state-backed multi-year effort to subvert an open source project by gaining the trust of the package's maintainer) was probably not an isolated incident. 

The foundations said that several 'credible takeover attempts' had been unsuccessfully launched against JavaScript-related projects.

Their post provides a list of "suspicious patterns" of behaviour that could indicate an attempted social engineering attack. The list isn't wrong, but to some degree it misses the point.

A team of German academics has discovered a crypto vulnerability in PuTTY, an extremely popular SSH and Telnet client for Windows users.

The vulnerability allows attackers who run malicious SSH servers to observe cryptographic signatures and recover a user's private key. This allows attackers to connect to systems where the private keys are being used for authentication.

But the vulnerability main impact is on source code repositories if they've been managed via a client that embeds PuTTY.