Author Archives: Sean Lyngaas

Power struggle: Government-funded researchers investigate vulnerabilities in EV charging stations

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Charging stations for electric cars have sprung up across the country in recent years as hybrid vehicles continue to gain popularity. As those stations carry more wattage, their potential effect on local power flows has grown. The trend caught the eye of researchers at a top government cybersecurity lab, who have embarked on a multiyear project to learn how hacking a charging station might disrupt the quality and flow of power through a local grid.   Kenneth Rohde, a cybersecurity researcher at the Idaho National Laboratory, explained the project to a room of engineers and hard-hat hackers at the S4 Conference last month in Miami. In a video, Rohde approached a charging station and ran an attack on the human machine interface (HMI), which affects the charging process by communicating with a control system. “Now you’ll see this power meter is jumping all over the place,” Rohde said. He executed […]

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DNC updates cybersecurity advice to protect candidates from hackers in 2020

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As Washington turns its attention to the 2020 presidential election, the Democratic National Committee on Friday released updated security guidance it says will “dramatically reduce the risk” of hackers breaching candidates’ devices. The checklist is straightforward security advice driven by an awareness of current threats. The DNC, scarred by the Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election, has invested in improving Democrats’ cyberdefenses in the last two years. U.S. intelligence officials warn that foreign adversaries will continue to target political organizations ahead of votes being cast in 2020. “Our adversaries are already at work, whether a candidate has announced or not,” DNC Chief Security Officer Bob Lord said in a statement. The DNC checklist advises candidates and their staffers to encrypt their laptops in case they are lost or stolen and to use a password manager to make it harder for attackers to crack credentials. The committee is encouraging everyone from […]

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This tool allows you to check the code powering Chrome extensions

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Browser extensions, like any other piece of software, can be abused or manipulated by hackers for malicious purposes. Duo Security wants to make it harder for that to happen. The company on Thursday released a beta version of a tool, CRXcavator, that screens extensions for Google Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser, for malicious code. “As our portal to the internet, browsers represent what is likely the largest common attack surface across consumers and businesses alike,” the Cisco-owned company said in a blog post. Extensions are handy for navigating the web, and some even offer important security features, but they can also allow third parties access a lot of user data. The new tool takes a stab at that security challenge by letting a user enter a Chrome extension and then returning a risk score for the application based on the permissions it grants on a computer. Tracking the third-party code used by an […]

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Researchers paint different portraits of hackers behind Ryuk ransomware

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Analysts poring over the Ryuk ransomware are coming to different conclusions about the hackers responsible and the victims they’re targeting, highlighting the subjective side of cyberthreat studies. One thing, however, is clear: the infectious malware pays. Newly published research from McAfee and Coveware finds that the average ransom payment involving Ryuk is more than 10 times that of other types of ransomware. Some victims of Ryuk “either lost their data or took on staggering financial risk to pay the ransom,” the researchers wrote. In some cases, Ryuk’s purveyors took big payouts of over 100 bitcoin (nearly $400,000 at current rates), in others they were satisfied with squeezing smaller sums from the victims, the McAfee-Coveware report said. The research follows a January report from another company, CrowdStrike, saying that hackers had earned $3.7 million from Ryuk since the ransomware emerged in August. Victims have reportedly included a North Carolina water utility and multiple […]

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As Europe prepares to vote, Microsoft warns of Fancy Bear attacks on democratic think tanks

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Three months before parliamentary elections in Europe, Microsoft says it has detected hacking attempts on democracy-focused think tanks from the Russian hacking group that breached the Democratic National Committee in 2016. From September to December 2018, hackers conducted cyberattacks on employees of the Aspen Institutes in Europe, the German Council on Foreign Relations, and the German Marshall Fund, Microsoft said late Tuesday. Microsoft said it was “confident” the hacking group it calls Strontium, more commonly known as Fancy Bear or APT28, was responsible for many of the attacks. Western officials have attributed the group to Russia’s military intelligence directorate. The malicious cyber activity concentrated on 104 accounts of think tank employees based in Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Serbia. Two of the affected organizations contacted by CyberScoop indicated the hacking attempts were unsuccessful. Andrew Kolb, a German Marshall Fund spokesman, told CyberScoop that there was no evidence his organization’s systems were compromised. Tyson Barker, […]

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Password manager report gets researcher booted from Bugcrowd

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The author of newly-published research that examines flaws in password managers has been kicked off Bugcrowd, a popular vulnerability-reporting platform, after one of the companies named in the research reported the author for violating Bugcrowd’s terms of service. Bugcrowd shut down Adrian Bednarek’s account after he violated the company’s rules on “unauthorized disclosure” by telling a reporter about a vulnerability in LastPass, a password management service. The vulnerability is an old bug that another researcher had already reported, but hadn’t been fixed. According to a disclosure timeline he shared with CyberScoop, Bednarek found himself banned from Bugcrowd on Feb 12., a day after he said he spoke with The Washington Post for a report that his consulting company, Independent Security Evaluators (ISE), ultimately published Tuesday. Bednarek had reported the vulnerability to Bugcrowd on Jan. 19. After being told it was a duplicate, he raised concerns that the bug still hadn’t been […]

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Australian parliament hacked by “sophisticated state actor,” prime minister says

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Australian authorities believe a “sophisticated state actor” has breached the Australian parliament’s computer network, the country’s prime minister told lawmakers Monday. “Our security agencies have detected this activity and acted decisively to confront it,” Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in a statement to parliament. “They are securing these systems and protecting users.” The Australian Cyber Security Centre – the country’s defensive cybersecurity agency – recently discovered the intrusion into the parliament’s House chamber, Morrison said. Officials subsequently found that the networks of multiple political parties had been affected, he added. Australia is set to hold a federal election within three months, but Morrison said there is no evidence the hack interfered in the electoral process. Even so, the government’s technical experts were ready to provide cybersecurity support to any political or electoral organization that might need it, the prime minister said. Cyber Security Centre officials “have also worked with […]

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NSO Group founders buy back their spyware company

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The founders of NSO Group, a controversial Israeli spyware vendor, said Thursday that they had re-acquired the company from private equity firm Francisco Partners. NSO Group co-founders Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie led the acquisition and promised more growth for the company, which reported dozens of customers and $250 million in revenue in 2018. NSO Group did not reveal the terms of the deal, which was supported by Novalpina Capital, a London-based firm. Sources had told CyberScoop in June of 2017 that Francisco Partners was asking for more than $1 billion for NSO Group. Francisco paid $120 million for a majority stake in the company in 2014. NSO Group says it lawfully sells its surveillance technology to governments to combat terrorism and organized crime. However, the company’s signature Pegasus spyware has been used to target journalists, anticorruption watchdogs and political dissidents, according to research from Amnesty International and the University of […]

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Democrats ask Trump administration to publish 2018 election security report

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Democratic lawmakers are calling on the Trump administration to release a public report on efforts to secure the 2018 midterm elections so the country can learn what worked and what didn’t. “It’s important for the public to have confidence in our election systems,” Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., told CyberScoop Wednesday. “In order to have confidence, I think there has to be transparency.” The departments of Homeland Security and Justice on Feb. 4 sent a classified report to President Donald Trump assessing foreign attempts to interfere in the 2018 midterms. Officials found no evidence that foreign operatives had a “material impact on the integrity or security” of election or campaign infrastructure used in the midterms, according to a statement summarizing the report. That terse statement is insufficient for lawmakers like Langevin. In the interest of transparency and making improvements, they say, the administration should publish an assessment of security in the […]

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Two hackers charged for DDoS attacks, threats to LAX

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Two men were charged with conducting cyberattacks on various organizations and threatening physical violence on Southern California school districts and the Los Angeles International Airport, among other targets, according to an indictment that was unsealed by U.S. prosecutors on Tuesday. The men, an American and a Briton, sent false reports of violent attacks on schools via email and carried out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on websites, according to the indictment announced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Central District of California. The defendants –a 19-year-old British national named George Duke-Cohan and a 20-year-old North Carolina man named Timothy Dalton Vaughn – are accused of being part of a hacking collective known as Apophis Squad. Duke-Cohan is already serving a prison sentence in Britain for threatening violence on an airliner, U.S. officials said. Vaughn’s online moniker, “WantedbyFeds,” turned prophetic Tuesday morning when he was arrested by U.S. authorities. Their alleged criminal […]

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