Newsletters

Tata Power: Tata Power, one of the largest electrical power producers in India, disclosed a security breach in a document [PDF] filed with India's national stock exchange. The company said the incident only impacted its IT systems—which is currently in the process of restoring—and that all other critical systems are operating as normal. [Additional coverage in TechCrunch]

Woolworths breach: Australian retail chain Woolworths said that a threat actor compromised an employee's credentials and accessed the backend of its MyDeal portal. The company is currently sending email notifications to all affected customers. Exposed data includes names, dates of birth, phone numbers, and home addresses, according to a notification seen by ABC.

Advanced incident: Advanced, one of the biggest IT providers for the UK NHS, disclosed a security breach last week, admitting they had their IT network compromised following an infection with the LockBit 3.0 ransomware.

We call it lameness because anyone with a basic understanding and foothold in the cybersecurity industry saw through this in the first five seconds.

Obviously, this disinformation campaign wasn't meant for the big-brains in the infosec industry, but because it was caught on early on and ridiculed into the ground, it was also almost immediately yeeted into the sun by the time of this newsletter, with the vast majority of the participating accounts being wiped clean (see list of accounts here, compiled by Stairwell security researcher Silas Cutler).

All of this fits in some bizarre trend that we've observed this year from the Chinese government, which has been obsessed with painting the US government, and the NSA in particular, as some sort of Dick Dastardly of the cyber-espionage world, responsible for all sorts of bad things, like... spying. Because that's obviously not what an intelligence agency does.

US President Joe Biden signed an executive order last Friday aimed at implementing a new privacy framework for data sharing between the European Union and the US (The EU-US Data Privacy Framework or EU-US DPF). The Executive Order on "Enhancing Safeguards For United States Signals Intelligence Activities" is intended to square the circle and balance US national security requirements for signals intelligence (SIGINT) against European Union human rights protections.

The goal of the privacy framework is to make transatlantic data flows between the EU and US legal and relatively easy by ensuring that EU citizens' user data is appropriately protected when it is transferred to the US. Two previous agreements — Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield — were both struck down by the European Court of Justice in 2015 and 2020 respectively for not adequately protecting users from US intelligence collection practices.

The EO adds new safeguards for US SIGINT activities, including:

STAX Finance hack: DeFi platform STAX Finance said it lost $2.3 million after an attacker exploited a bug in TempleDAO, the backbone of its service.

Forced to delete notebooks and files: Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, Twitter's former head of security, alleged that Twitter management forced him to burn notebooks and delete files in order to get his severance package. According to Bloomberg, citing court documents unsealed this week, this included 10 handwritten notebooks and deleted 100 computer files.

Brute-force protection for local admin accounts now generally available: With yesterday's Patch Tuesday security updates, Microsoft has also enabled a new feature by default for all Windows OS versions that will lock and freeze all local admin accounts for 10 minutes after 10 failed login attempts. The feature is meant to be Microsoft's best protection against brute-force attacks, including those carried out via RDP, that have served as an initial entry for many cybercrime and cyber-espionage operations over the past years. A similar feature to block SMB-based brute-force attacks is also in the works.

But despite their oversized presence on npm, their end goals were not up to par with their determination to infect targets. Checkmarks said that the group used the stolen credentials to merely boost their Discord server. Stolen gaming and streaming account creds were leaked on the Cracked.io hacking forum as a way to draw attention and promote their hacking tools (many of which were widely available via a public GitHub page) and an underground service for selling fake Instagram followers.

Imagine spending all this time flooding the npm portal with fake libraries, compromising developer boxes, and all of it just for some hacker rep.

We often hear about reports of malicious libraries being found on PyPI, npm, or Rubygems, but in recent years, all of these have been linked to teenage hackerism like this or to some lame cryptomining op. For all the hype surrounding supply chain attacks, it appears that threat actors like LofyGang are exhibiting a serious lack of imagination when they manage to land a malicious package on any of these repos for more than a week or two. One reason why these attacks are often spotted early on is because the DevSecOps has quickly matured, and tools to continuously scan public package repos have caught up with attackers' speed.

Prosecutors did add wire fraud charges to Sullivan's case, related to the actual bug bounty payout to the hackers, in December 2021, but the charges were eventually dropped, leaving the core of the case to hinge around the Uber exec's obstruction of justice.

Sullivan, who once used to be a prosecutor in the same office that charged him now, faces up to eight years in prison and $500,000 in fines. His sentencing hearing has not been scheduled yet.

But regardless of the fine minutia of the case, the infosec industry has been seriously rocked by Sullivan's prosecution. Several opinions going online argue that the case will either drive away legitimate professionals from CISO/CSO roles to minor or completely different positions or industries or will drive up position salaries through the stratosphere if security execs are now literally expected to fall on the legal sword following a security breach and all the legal shenanigans that often take place in the backstage of many organizations. Because we know they do.

Google has released a new six-part documentary series profiling various Google security teams including the Threat Analysis Group and Project Zero among others.

We've seen Episode 000 so far and it's great fun. It covers the 2010 "Operation Aurora" hack from Google's perspective (although dozens of other US companies were also affected). This was a watershed moment in cyber security history and it resulted in both a significant change in Google's security posture and its relationship with China. Google's remarkably frank and norm-shattering press release on the hack from back then will get you primed for viewing.

Hacktivist group Guacamaya which we mentioned in late September is having some impact in South America, particularly in Mexico. Despite that, the group told The Record that it was not particularly happy that journalists had focused on Mexican President López Obrador's health rather than on the environmental impacts of Tren Maya, an intercity railway megaproject.

The move to block these popular GFW circumvention tools comes two days after the Chinese government also blocked access to 1,147 Google domains. This includes both DNS and SNI-based blocks, in China's greatest crackdown on Google services to date.

Telstra breach: Two weeks after Australian telco Optus disclosed a data breach, its main rival Telstra also disclosed a similar incident. However, as the company explained in a breach notification posted on its website, the incident is far smaller than the Optus breach and only involved the personal data of employees the company had back in 2017.

Suspected ADATA breach: The operators of the RandomHouse data extortion group claimed on early Wednesday to have breached Taiwanese hardware vendor ADATA. If confirmed, this would mark the second time the company gets hacked after suffering a ransomware attack by the RagnarLocker gang last year.

The arrests last week mark the first time Air Lords members were arrested on cybercrime-related charges.

Previously, past Interpol and FBI operations had gone after suspects linked to Black Axe, another Nigerian confraternity that devolved into a global crime syndicate.

While Black Axe members have been arrested for cybercrime activities as far back as 2015, international law enforcement started heavily concentrating on the group cybercrime "division" last year, with several crackdowns in September 2021, October 2021, April 2022, and May 2022.

Since such operations are usually carried out with automated tools like headless browsers, Twitch's security team initially responded to the attack by blocking all user logins from all browsers except the very most recent versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, on which most of its "legitimate" userbase would likely be using.

"There are organized groups trying to create botnets—bots that end up getting used for hate raids. There was one such mob very active recently," said Twitch chief product officer Tom Verrilli said in a Twitter thread yesterday, trying to explain to users what was happening and why some of them couldn't log in.

"When that happens, we (1) close whatever hole they found, (2) clean up the bot accounts made. Because (1) takes time, we're temporarily restricting log-in to certain browsers," he added.