Author Archives: Patrick Howell O'Neill

DJI drones banned by U.S. Army due to ‘cyber vulnerabilities’

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The U.S. Army has banned the use of drones from the Chinese firm Daijiang Innovation Corporation (DJI) citing “increased awareness of cyber vulnerabilities” in DJI products, the drone blog sUAS News reports. DJI, whose products are widely used throughout the Pentagon, told CyberScoop they are “surprised and disappointed” to read the reports and are reaching out to the U.S. Army for confirmation and clarification. The Army did not respond to requests for comment and clarification from CyberScoop. DJI, the world’s largest manufacturer of small civilian drones, shares sensitive customer information including “location, flight records and possibly video shot by users and uploaded to its servers” with governments that require it, including the China, the company says. It’s not clear how this policy impacts U.S. customers, including the Army, or if this policy is related to the Army’s reported decision. The memo, quoted below, outlines DJI’s popularity in the Army and […]

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Russian hacker gets 46 months in U.S. prison for role in creating huge botnet

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Maxim Senakh, a Russian citizen who pleaded guilty earlier this year to involvement in a global botnet conspiracy, was sentenced to 46 months in a U.S. prison followed by deportation. Senakh utilized malware known as Ebury to steal credentials and build up a botnet involving tens of thousands of compromised machines in the U.S. and around the world. Senakh, 41, was arrested in 2015 in Finland on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The Russian Foreign Ministry criticized Senakh’s detention as an “illegal practice” and a “witchhunt.” He pleaded guilty March 28, 2017. The botnet was used to generate and redirect internet traffic to make money from click-fraud and email spam worth millions of dollars in revenue, prosecutors said. Senakh admitted to playing a role in a broader criminal enterprise by developing the botnet’s infrastructure through creating accounts with domain registrars and then profiting from the […]

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WannaCry’s bitcoins were converted to Monero, researchers say

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Three months after WannaCry impacted more than 300,000 computers in over 150 countries, the bitcoins paid by victims have been exchanged for Monero, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that’s seen a spike in popularity and price over the last year, according to researchers at the Italian cryptocurrency intelligence firm Neutrino. Beginning on Wednesday night, a Twitter bot set up by the business blog Quartz watched as money was drained from the wallet. The first such transaction can be seen below: 🚨 7.34128314 BTC ($20,055.52 USD) has just been withdrawn from a bitcoin wallet tied to #wcry ransomware. https://t.co/wX2k9pJLNQ — actual ransom (@actual_ransom) August 3, 2017 Alberto Ornaghi, Neutrino’s chief technology officer, told CyberScoop that Monero is attractive because “it’s a highly oriented privacy cryptocurrency.” The idea of shifting the funds to to Monero, a three-year old project widely seen as a powerful anonymization tool, has been bandied about for months by a wide range of observers. It looks […]

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Chinese tech firm disputes report it siphons smartphone data after Amazon suspends sales

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Chinese tech firm Adups and American phone manufacturer Blu are disputing reports of privacy and security problems plaguing their products after Amazon temporarily suspended the sale of Blu phones, which are some of the most popular on the retail site. In response, the American cybersecurity company that claimed Adups was quietly siphoning heaps of data from mobile phones issued a statement Wednesday sticking to its story. “We stand by our findings because we have clear forensic evidence, both in terms of code and in terms of network traces, to support them,” Kryptowire, the cybersecurity company, said in a press release. CyberScoop reported on Kryptowire’s findings on July 25. Adups initially did not respond to requests for comment, but reached out two days later, calling the article “malicious slander” and asking “to stop refrain from reporting, and withdraw the article.” An Adups representative claimed third-party testers — including Kryptowire — had verified that the security and privacy issues had been solved. […]

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HBO hack could expose employees’ financial information and internal emails

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Hackers claimed to have breached HBO computer networks have leaked personal financial information and passwords belonging to company employees, as well as what appears to be unreleased television scripts and episodes. The hackers posted leaked data to “winter-leaks.com” on Tuesday, but by Wednesday the site was intermittently offline. The HBO hack haul is 1.5 terabytes, the hackers say, seven times the 200 gigabytes of the Sony hack. There is no independent confirmation for these numbers, yet multiple files posted for download were above 100 gb in size. The unidentified hackers promise more is coming including emails, databases and “precious stuff that blaze your eyes,” according to an email sent to reporters preceding the leak.  The hackers also offered rewards to reporters who pleased them: “You are lucky to be the first pioneers to witness and download the leak,” the hackers wrote. “Enjoy it & spread the words. Whoever spreads well, we will have an interview […]

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Serial crook posed as Anonymous and extorted news websites with DDoS, officials say

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Federal officers arrested a Seattle man this week for allegedly launching denial-of-service attacks against the legal news site Leagle.com after the company refused his demands to remove court documents about the alleged hacker’s past criminal activity. Kamyar Jahanrakhshan, also known as Andrew Rakhshan, faces charges for hacking, extortion and making death threats. He is accused of attacking Leagle in 2015 while allegedly claiming to be part of “the anonymous hackers group.” Canada’s Metro News, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Sydney Morning Herald and others also received requests and then demands to remove news and court documents about past criminal charges and lawsuits. The documents in question involve a 2006 conviction for theft in Washington state and a June 2010 news report outlining accusations that Rakhsahn ran “an international credit card scam to finance his taste for the high life and interfering with a police investigation.” He was arrested in 2009 after a Vancouver boat chase in which he was trailed by a bailiff hired by a […]

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Back in America with a black eye, Silent Circle rebuilds with focus on software

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Silent Circle’s move to Switzerland in 2014 caused a huge stir. Just after Edward Snowden became a household name, the up-and-coming American tech firm boasting cybersecurity elder statesman Phil Zimmerman bolted from the Western hemisphere in the name of Swiss privacy laws and international neutrality. Three years later, Silent Circle is back in the United States. With relatively little fanfare and following millions of dollars in losses, the mobile security firm is now headquartered in Washington, D.C. It’s focusing on software security products instead of the hardware that initially earned global attention, and it’s aiming to ramp up sales to federal government as cybersecurity and IT modernization remains a focal point, CEO Gregg Smith told CyberScoop. The company recently signed partnerships with Dell and Cog Systems to that end. Among the active government customers Smith described are law enforcement units on the U.S.-Mexico border that employ Silent Circle software to guard against “the cartel’s 91 listening posts,” he said, which […]

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Jeff Sessions made investors want to throw money at dark net intelligence firms

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When U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions stepped in front of cameras and told the world about the international law enforcement operation that resulted in the bust of at least two multimillion-dollar dark net markets, investors’ ears perked up. OWL Cybersecurity is a two-year old Denver-based dark net intelligence firm currently closing a funding round. In the one week since Sessions and other federal law enforcement officials announced the AlphaBay dark net bust, OWL vice president Andrew Lewman says he has received a mountain of phone calls from potential investors. “Regardless of your politics, when Jeff Sessions stands up and says ‘the dark net is a concern, that gets a lot of attention,” Lewman said. “In the past two weeks, we’ve had all these people we’ve talked to in the past saying they didn’t understand it, didn’t know what it was come at us and say, ‘About that investment, are you still taking offers?’” […]

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Adobe will finally kill Flash in 2020

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Adobe Flash has been beaten, battered and bruised countless times over recent years. Now it’s finally going to die. The software will meet its demise by the end of 2020, Adobe said, closing a two-decade long chapter on one of the most popular and controversial pieces of technology in the history of the internet. “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats,” Adobe announced in a blog post on Tuesday. It’s tough to overstate the security impact Flash has had in the last two decades. The software has drawn denunciations — including “most frequently exploited product” — so many times that detractors as famous as Steve Jobs have called for its death for more than a decade. Adobe and a slate of tech giants now agree that the story needs and ending: Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla will end support for the technology […]

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North Korea’s internet connections to China and India come under scrutiny

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New analysis of recent North Korean internet traffic reveals that the reclusive regime is most likely carrying out its cyber-operations via the networks of other countries across Asia, Oceania and Africa. The report released Tuesday by threat intelligence firm Recorded Future finds fast-growing internet usage in North Korea that in many ways mirrors what people do online elsewhere: North Koreans go on social media, stream video, play video games and shop. But “a near absence of malicious cyber activity” from within North Korea itself supports the longstanding assumption that Pyongyang conducts cyber-operations from outside its own borders, researchers concluded. Another key piece of evidence that Recorded Future found in the data, which was collected by the nonprofit Internet security research group Team Cymru: above-average activity from North Korea’s internet to notable points in a handful of foreign countries, including China and India. The data was gathered from April 1 to July 6 on internet address blocks believed to be used by […]

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