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Your weekly dose of Seriously Risky Business news is written by Tom Uren, edited by Patrick Gray and supported by the Cyber Initiative at the Hewlett Foundation, AustCyber and founding corporate sponsors CyberCX and Proofpoint.

Your correspondent participated in the Lowy Institute's Frontier Rules conference in Canberra this week, which is why this newsletter is a day late.

One interesting discussion at the conference concerned the Russian attack on Viasat's KA-SAT network. This newsletter previously wrote:

The researchers also looked at some of the reasons why, in 2022, so many popular websites still haven't learned anything from the hacks from the last decade.

One of the reasons they put forward was that companies are shifting their attention to multi-factor authentication, and many websites may not care to strengthen their password policies. Another was related to auditors.

"Websites need to pass security audits, and the firms who do these audits, such as Deloitte, recommend or mandate outdated practices," researchers said.

Whatever is going on at the Microsoft Security Response Center, it appears that's rubbing a lot of today's top researchers the wrong way, but also creating a lot of frustration for those who have to deal with the company’s technology on a daily basis, especially from a security posture.

Belarus leak: Belarusian hacktivist group Cyber Partisans released on Tuesday 1.5 TB of data they claim is phone calls secretly collected by the Belarusian Ministry of Internal Affairs from foreign embassies and consulates inside Belarus. The group claims they have more than 50,000 hours of recorded calls, according to Cyberscoop. Among the leaked audio are phone calls allegedly recorded inside the Russian embassy in Minsk.

Shoprite incident: Shoprite, one of the largest supermarket chains in South Africa, has been hit by the RansomHouse ransomware group, according to The Record.

SeaFlower group: Confiant said in a report last week that it detected a new threat actor—that it named SeaFlower—targeting cryptocurrency users. Since at least March this year, the group has operated websites cloned after legitimate cryptocurrency wallets. These websites, which target Chinese-speaking audiences, host backdoored wallet apps that steal users' private wallet seeds.

ASyncRAT stats: Malwarebytes reported this week that its telemetry indicated that ASyncRAT had become the most widespread malware payload delivered via email spam in the first half of 2022. ASyncRAT was ranked #3 throughout 2021, behind Dridex and TrickBot.

Finland arrest: An online scammer was detained in Finland last week after defrauding local car dealerships. Investigators said they were able to identify the suspect after they took a high-quality photo of a fake check where one of their fingertips was also visible, allowing them to identify them based on police records. (h/t @mikko)

Optimism hack: In one of the most facepalm-worthy crypto-hacks of all time, the Optimism cryptocurrency project said it lost $19 million worth of funds after one of its partners sent funds to an Ethereum wallet they didn't yet have full control of. The cringeworthy IR report is here, and, according to Motherboard, the Optimism project is now pleading with the person who spotted and hijacked the errant transfer to return some of the stolen funds.

Mobike leak: Bike-sharing service Mobike leaked the passports, driver's licenses, and identity documents of more than 120,000 customers. Almost all of the identity documents were for users in Latin America, including Argentina and Brazil, TechCrunch reported, which worked for months with the vendor to have the leaky server secured.

TheTruthSpy leak: TheTruthSpy, a quite popular stalkerware app, also left servers exposed on the internet. Per Motherboard, the company leaked data from smartphones where the app was installed. Leaked data included photos of children, pets, and others related to babies, per the news outlet.

"Our DCU investigation found Bohrium targeted customers in the US, Middle East, and India. Targets come from sectors including tech, transportation, government, and education," Hogan-Burney said.

The Microsoft exec said the group's members used fake social media profiles, often posing as recruiters, and lured employees at targeted organisations on one of the 41 malicious sites. Here, they tried to collect their personal information, which they later used in subsequent email attacks that sought to infect the victims with malware.

To date, Microsoft's DCU team has used the US court system to seize domains and server infrastructure from more than two-dozen cybercrime and espionage groups alike.

Palermo: The IT infrastructure of the city of Palermo, Italy, has been down since last Friday following a cyber-attack.

Maiar hack: DeFi platform Maiar said on Monday that a threat actor exploited a vulnerability on its platform and stole more than $113 million worth of cryptocurrency from its wallets. In a YouTube video published on Tuesday, the platform's CEO said they had already recovered 95% of the stolen funds.

Schulte profile: The New Yorker has a fantastic profile of Joshua Schulte, the former CIA agent behind the WikiLeaks Vault7 leak.

"Our DCU investigation found Bohrium targeted customers in the US, Middle East, and India. Targets come from sectors including tech, transportation, government, and education," Hogan-Burney said.

The Microsoft exec said the group's members used fake social media profiles, often posing as recruiters, and lured employees at targeted organizations on one of the 41 malicious sites. Here, they tried to collect their personal information, which they later used in subsequent email attacks that sought to infect the victims with malware.

To date, Microsoft's DCU team has used the US court system to seize domains and server infrastructure from more than two-dozen cybercrime and espionage groups alike.

In a statement posted on its website, the political group claimed they carried out the attack with the help of "a network of dissidents inside Iran."

MEK said they timed the attack to take place on the eve of Ayatollah Khomeini's death, mourned/celebrated each year across Iran on June 3.

As part of their intrusion, MEK said they also used the compromised servers of the Tehran municipality to send SMS messages to more than 585,000 Iranian phones. The messages read: "Damned be Khomeini, death to Khamenei and Raisi, Hail to Rajavi," according to a video the organization published on YouTube.

Your weekly dose of Seriously Risky Business news is written by Tom Uren, edited by Patrick Gray, and supported by the Cyber Initiative at the Hewlett Foundation, AustCyber, and founding corporate sponsors CyberCX and Proofpoint.

Hacked documents released last week have shed light on the extent, brutality, and official government support for the PRC's oppression of its Uyghur population. Given the long history of states pretending to be hacktivists, we thought we'd examine the incident to see if there are any red flags a state might be behind the hack.

The documents, released as the Xinjiang Police Files, contain a range of different file types, including transcripts of not-for-publication speeches from Chinese officials, operational directives for police, detainee photos and personal records, and also internal police PowerPoint files. These files were provided to Dr. Adrian Zenz, Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and a leading researcher of China's Xinjiang re-education camps. Zenz stated on Twitter that the files were provided by an individual who got access "by hacking into Xinjiang police/re-education camp computers" in two separate counties. In a journal article, Zenz expands on how he acquired the files: