Author Archives: Sean Lyngaas

Customs and Border Protection subcontractor hack exposes traveler photos, license plates

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Monday that one of its subcontractors had been breached in a “malicious cyberattack,” compromising an unspecified number of images of travelers and license plates. The hackers struck after the unnamed subcontractor transferred copies of the images collected by CBP to the subcontractor’s network, the Department of Homeland Security agency said in a statement. “Initial information indicates that the subcontractor violated mandatory security and privacy protocols outlined in their contract,” a CBP spokesperson said, adding that the breached data had yet to show up on the dark web or public internet. CBP, which learned about the hack on May 31, has told Members of Congress about the breach and is working with law enforcement agencies and “cybersecurity entities” to investigate, the spokesperson said. While CBP did not identify the hacked subcontractor, the statement it emailed to The Washington Post included “Perceptics” in the title. Tennessee-based […]

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Senator asks Department of Justice if it can keep a lid on its software exploits

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In recent years, Department of Justice agencies have quietly acquired and deployed hacking tools in support of their law enforcement mission. A handful of high-profile cases have brought greater scrutiny to those efforts, most notably in 2016 when the FBI used a contractor to crack the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. Now, a senator is asking Attorney General William Barr for a more thorough accounting of what law enforcement agencies are doing to protect these software exploits from foreign intelligence agencies and other adversaries. “Just as the American people expect the government to protect its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, so too do Americans expect that the government will protect its cyber arsenal from theft by hackers and foreign spies,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., wrote to Barr in a letter dated June 5. In particular, the department has invested heavily in tools to break encrypted communications, as top law enforcement officials have lamented the […]

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Proposed State Department bureau takes wrong approach to U.S. cyber diplomacy

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This week the State Department formally notified Congress of its long overdue plan to establish a new Bureau for Cyberspace Security and Emerging Technologies. This news, which was expected for almost a year, should in theory be welcomed by lawmakers. In 2018, the Republican-controlled House grew so frustrated with former Secretary Rex Tillerson’s plan to abolish the State Department’s cybersecurity coordinator – the country’s top cyber diplomat – that it passed legislation to not just reconstitute the position but actually elevate its stature and responsibilities. This rare rebuke of the administration by the president’s own party could have been rectified by Tillerson’s successor, Mike Pompeo. Instead, the department’s latest plan may be worse than Tillerson’s. There are two fundamental and related problems with the department’s proposed cyber bureau. First, the bureau’s focus is far too narrow. By limiting the scope of the bureau’s purview to security – and excluding the digital economy, […]

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Researchers uncover new MuddyWater targeting of government, telecommunications entities

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Undeterred by the reported dumping of its data online, an Iran-linked hacking group has been using malicious documents and files to target telecommunications organizations and impersonate government entities in Iraq, Pakistan, and Tajikistan, researchers said Thursday. The so-called MuddyWater group has been carrying out attacks in two stages against the targets, according to research published by Israeli company ClearSky Cyber Security. The first stage uses lure documents to exploit a known vulnerability in Microsoft Office that allows for remote code execution. The second stage lets the attackers communicate with hacked servers to download an infected file. “This is the first time MuddyWater has used these two vectors in conjunction,” ClearSky said in its research, which warned that just three antivirus engines were detecting the malicious documents analyzed. In one example, a document disguised as a United Nations development plan for Tajikistan was actually packed with malware. The malware was uploaded to VirusTotal, the […]

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West Africa’s Scattered Canary gang shows how cybercriminals supersize email scams

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Sometimes the most effective scam techniques are also the most mundane. Business email compromise attacks don’t involve advanced malware, and aren’t carried out by headline-grabbing nation-state hackers. BEC scams simply rely on personalized emails to dupe victims into transferring funds to someone who appears to be a co-worker, friend, or family member.   But this fraud technique is taking a toll, depriving Americans of a vast sum of money each year. In 2018, the FBI’s cybercrime center received over 20,000 BEC complaints that accounted for estimated losses of $1.2 billion. Understanding the scale of the problem requires understanding how perpetrators scale their operations. The decade-long evolution of one Western African cybercriminal gang is a case in point. Email security firm Agari on Wednesday published research documenting the so-called Scattered Canary group’s rise from a lone individual to dozens of operatives specializing in various aspects of fraud. The group also has grown from peddling romance scams to targeting […]

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State Department proposes new $20.8 million cybersecurity bureau

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The State Department has sent to Congress a long-awaited plan to reestablish a cybersecurity-focused bureau it says is key to supporting U.S. diplomatic efforts in cyberspace. The State Department’s new plan, obtained by CyberScoop, would create the Bureau of Cyberspace Security and Emerging Technologies (CSET) to “lead U.S. government diplomatic efforts to secure cyberspace and its technologies, reduce the likelihood of cyber conflict, and prevail in strategic cyber competition.” The new bureau, with a proposed staff of 80 and projected budget of $20.8 million, would be led by a Senate-confirmed coordinator and “ambassador-at-large” with the equivalent status of an assistant secretary of State, who would report to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. The idea comes nearly two years after then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced he would abolish the department’s cybersecurity coordinator position and put its support staff under the department’s economic bureau. CSET would “unify the policy functions and […]

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House bill would boost CISA funding by $335 million

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House lawmakers on Tuesday released a draft fiscal 2020 appropriations bill that would increase funding by $335 million for the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to a bill summary. The House Appropriations Committee bill would allot $2 billion for CISA in fiscal 2020 in recognition of the tall task CISA faces in helping civilian agencies fend off hackers, among other priorities. According to the summary, the legislation would allot $156 million for Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program, which agencies use to monitor their networks for threats. The bill provides “necessary funding increases…to defend our nation’s infrastructure from physical and rising cyberthreats,” House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., said in a statement. The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security will consider the bill on Wednesday. Senate appropriators have yet to release a companion bill. CISA, which was formally established in November when the agency’s name and cybersecurity […]

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Tech giants say UK spy agency’s encryption proposal as threat to security and human rights

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A proposal from a British spy agency to allow law enforcement access to encrypted communications in certain cases “poses serious threats to cybersecurity and fundamental human rights including privacy and free expression,” a group of security researchers, civil liberties groups, and tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, have warned. In an open letter to GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s signals intelligence agency, the coalition of tech organizations rejected the agency’s suggestion that adding a law enforcement official to a group chat or call would not threaten civil liberties or the security of encrypted messaging services. If implemented, the GCHQ proposal would “undermine the authentication process that enables users to verify that they are communicating with the right people, introduce potential unintentional vulnerabilities, and increase risks that communications systems could be abused or misused,” states the letter, which was made public this week. Other signatories include Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without […]

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Rights groups probe investments in NSO Group’s private equity firm

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Since a February shakeup of the management structure of Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group, whose software has allegedly been used to target journalists and other civilians, human rights activists have stepped up their scrutiny of the vendor’s new private equity firm. The probing of London-based Novalpina Capital, which now controls the NSO Group board, is an effort to highlight what critics say is a failure by NSO Group and its investors to prevent the abuse of the company’s mobile-phone hacking tools. Now, the inquiry is drawing attention to the unexpected role that pension funds in the U.S. and the UK are playing in the standoff between the Israeli vendor and digital rights groups like Amnesty International and Citizen Lab, a research center at University of Toronto’s Munk School. In a letter last week to Britain’s South Yorkshire Pensions Authority (SYPA), Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert asked the pension fund to take a hard look […]

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DHS assessment of foreign VPN apps finds security risk real, data lacking

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The risk posed by foreign-made virtual private network (VPN) applications must be accounted for — even if government device users have avoided such apps — because adversaries are interested in exploiting the software, according to a senior Department of Homeland Security official. “Open-source reporting indicates nation-state actors have demonstrated intent and capability to leverage VPN services and vulnerable users for malicious purposes,” Chris Krebs, director of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), wrote in a May 22 letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., obtained by CyberScoop. There is no overarching U.S. policy preventing government mobile device users from downloading foreign VPN apps, according to Krebs. “Even with the implementation of technical solutions, if a U.S. government employee downloaded a foreign VPN application originating from an adversary nation, foreign exploitation of that data would be somewhat or highly likely,” Krebs wrote. “This exploitation could lead to loss of data integrity and confidentiality […]

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