Author Archives: Greg Otto

Ex-NSA contractor set to plead guilty for theft of top secret information

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A former National Security Agency contractor accused of perhaps the largest theft of government secrets in U.S. history is expected to plead guilty Thursday in federal court, according to court records. Harold T. Martin III has been charged with 20 counts of unauthorized and willful retention of national defense information in 2017. His trial was scheduled to start in June, but a rearraignment — a hearing held when a defendant is changing a plea — has been scheduled for 3 p.m. Thursday in Baltimore, Maryland. Martin, a former Navy officer turned defense contractor, was indicted for allegedly stealing and hoarding secret documents that outline U.S. hacking operations. Martin worked in a supporting role for multiple intelligence agencies — including the NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — during his employment at several different federal consulting firms. Investigators found over the course of their investigation that Martin had removed […]

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Introducing the RunSafe Pwn Index

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So much of the dark web leaves enterprises, well, in the dark. Unless a security team has someone infiltrating and scouring hacker forums, it’s hard to get a handle on how much money adversaries are spending on the latest exploits. We’ve seen tons of stories on exorbitant price points for first-class zero-days, but attackers don’t need to shell out Rolls Royce prices for every remote code execution on the market. In order to give enterprises a better look at what attackers are paying for, CyberScoop has teamed up with McLean, Virginia-based RunSafe Security to bring you the RunSafe Pwn Index. Think of it as the Dow Jones Industrial Average for dark web exploits: Every quarter, RunSafe examines multiple sources of exploit data, including dark web marketplaces, payout services and private practitioners. From the zero-day pricing data it collects, RunSafe then creates a weighted average price based on the target platform […]

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The struggle with simplifying the government’s cybersecurity efforts

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When it comes to protecting the federal government from cyberattacks, simplicity is not that simple. That was the underlying message Monday during multiple panels at RSA Public Sector conference in San Francisco, where government cybersecurity experts and the federal contractors that carry out the government’s cybersecurity operations discussed why things are currently complicated and what it will take to make things easier. The government’s ongoing embrace of the cloud is helping move things in the right direction, but because agencies often follow a hybrid cloud model, watching over a government enterprise is still a highly complex task. Kevin Cox, the program manager for the Department of Homeland Security’s Continuous Diagnostics and Monitoring program, said Monday that it’s a challenge to ascertain exactly how each agency has its enterprise configured. “From our perspective, CDM is working with civilian agencies to have a foundation in place to have the proper visibility on […]

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Former Air Force intelligence officer charged with espionage

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A former U.S. Air Force intelligence agent has been charged with espionage, with the Department of Justice alleging the officer defected to Iran in order to help recruit assets from the U.S. intelligence community. Monica Witt is accused of spying in a forthcoming indictment that will be unsealed Wednesday, the DOJ said. According to the indictment, Witt was allegedly recruited by Iran as part of a program that targets former U.S. intelligence officers and others who have held security clearances.  After defecting in 2013, she is alleged to have told the Iranian government about what the DOJ called a “highly classified intelligence collection program.” Witt is also alleged to have revealed the identity of a U.S. intelligence officer. Additionally, four members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have been charged with “computer intrusions and aggravated identity theft” aimed at members of the U.S. intel community.  Witt is alleged to have assisted […]

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Researchers found a way to hack those ubiquitous electric scooters

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You can add another bullet point to the long list of things that drive people nuts about the electric scooter craze in America: the scooters can be hacked. A researcher with San Francisco-based Zimperium discovered a way to manipulate Xiaomi M365 scooter through a Bluetooth connection. Users can access their scooter via an app that connects to the scooter, as long as users authenticate with a password. However Zimperium researcher Rani Idan determined the password fails to completely protect users. “During our research, we determined the password is not being used properly as part of the authentication process with the scooter and that all commands can be executed without the password,” Idan wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “The password is only validated on the application side, but the scooter itself doesn’t keep track of the authentication state.” From there, Idan wrote an app for his mobile device that allowed him to […]

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Axonius raises $13 million to boost product that tracks connected devices

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You’d be hard pressed to find someone in charge of an enterprise’s information security efforts who finds it easy to monitor all the connected devices sitting on the network. New York-based Axonius understands this, which is why it created a platform that allows CISOs to automatically boot these devices off a network if they don’t fit with the enterprise’s security policies. The company is building its business around the platforms, thanks to a new funding raise. The company announced a $13 million series A funding Tuesday, led by Bessemer Venture Partners. There was also participation from existing investors YL Ventures, Vertex, WTI and Emerge. The company says the platform differs from similar products due to its ease of installation, as well as the automation built into the product. Axonius says enterprises don’t have deploy an agent, a piece of software that is put on each device in similar solutions. Additionally, the company claims the product […]

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Inside the online fight between DerbyCon, illmob, and harassed infosec women

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A published cybersecurity expert and the person in charge of security at a popular information security conference are at odds over a Facebook group that has served as a platform for harassment and misogynistic comments toward women in the profession. Last month, the founders of DerbyCon — an annual hacker conference held in Louisville, Kentucky — announced that 2019 would be the last year for the event. In a blog post announcing the cancellation, the conference’s founders didn’t point to a single incident that led them to their decision. However, one passage stirred up controversy: “There is a small, yet vocal group of people creating negativity, polarization, and disruption, with the primary intent of self-promotion to advance a career, for personal gain, or for more social media followers.” The “negativity, polarization and disruption” heightened in the wake of the announcement, with members of a Facebook group known as “illmob” posting comments […]

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Apple disables group chat on FaceTime after discovery of bad bug

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Apple has disabled the group chat feature of its FaceTime video calling service after a bug was discovered that allows users to eavesdrop on others via audio and video. The bug, which takes advantage of a logic flaw in the app’s group chat, works like this: When making a FaceTime video call, the caller adds themselves to a group chat before the user on the other end picks up. Once added, the bug leads FaceTime to believe an active group call has started, even though the recipient hasn’t answered the call. The person who initiated the call can then hear audio from the recipient’s device. Shortly after the initial audio bug was discovered, users also found that if recipients pressed the power or volume down button to silence or dismiss the call, video was transmitted back to the person initiating the call. According to Apple’s status page, the company has […]

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How sloppy OPSEC gave researchers an inside look at the exploit industry

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The companies that make advanced surveillance software are quiet by design. They generate enough press to let the market (i.e., governments) know their products exist, but it’s not as if there’s an app store for mobile spyware. They do make mistakes, though. And thanks to two researchers from Lookout, the public now has more information on how these companies operate. In the course of investigating a new kind of Android-focused mobile malware, Lookout’s Andrew Blaich and Michael Flossman uncovered text conversations among members of a nation-state’s surveillance program. Those files, which were stored on a server that was part of the malware’s command-and-control infrastructure, represented a trove of insight about how much money the particular government budgeted for its program, whether its spies decided to buy exploits or build their own, and why it’s easier than ever for countries to leverage surveillance technology. It started when Blaich and Flossman were analyzing how a single malware sample had manipulated data within the popular […]

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Two Ukrainians charged with hacking into SEC’s EDGAR database

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The Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice announced charges Tuesday against an alleged Ukrainian hacker and several other suspects in a scheme where nonpublic information was taken from the commission’s corporate filing system and used for illegal financial trading. Oleksandr Ieremenko is alleged to have hacked into the SEC’s EDGAR system, accessing “test files,” which companies can use to submit information ahead of their public earnings reports. Sometimes companies include nonpublic information in those filings. According to the SEC and U.S. Attorney’s Office of  New Jersey, Ieremenko extracted nonpublic test files from SEC servers, and then passed the information to different groups of traders. The traders made transactions before at least 157 earnings releases from May to October 2016, generating at least $4.1 million in illegal profits. The SEC discovered the breach in 2016 after realizing there was a vulnerability in the EDGAR system. The agency didn’t suspect until […]

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