Author Archives: Tim Starks

Nothing is sacred: Ransomware attack hit toy maker Mattel’s systems this summer

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Count the company behind Barbie dolls and Fisher-Price toys among the ever-growing list of digital extortion victims. A ransomware attack struck toy manufacturer Mattel this summer, the company said in a financial disclosure to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In a year when ransomware has threatened elections, hospitals and schools, the attack on Mattel demonstrates once more that the attack method is leaving no kind of target untouched. In its Nov. 3 quarterly report, Mattel said it emerged from the attack largely unscathed, however. It discovered the intrusion on July 28, when a number of its IT systems became encrypted. “Promptly upon detection of the attack, Mattel began enacting its response protocols and taking a series of measures to stop the attack and restore impacted systems,” the company said. “Mattel contained the attack and, although some business functions were temporarily impacted, Mattel restored its operations.” The report continued: “A forensic investigation of the […]

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Robocalls urging voters to skip Election Day are subject of FBI investigation, DHS official says

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The FBI is investigating apparent voter suppression robocalls across the nation, a senior Department of Homeland Security official said Tuesday. An estimated 10 million calls have gone out urging people to “stay safe and stay home.” There also were reports of robocalls in Michigan falsely telling voters they could vote on Wednesday, because lines on Election Day were long. The FBI is “tracking down this issue,” said the senior official in DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The FBI did not immediately return a request for comment. In the call with reporters, conducted on the condition of anonymity, the CISA official said it was nothing out of the ordinary. “Robocalls of this nature happen in every election,” the official said. The FBI’s investigation into robocalls isn’t the only one this campaign season. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently filed felony charges against conservative operatives Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, alleging that they were responsible […]

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Last-minute court rulings on election go against GOP, voting restrictions

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A federal judge on Monday rejected a Texas GOP bid to throw out approximately 127,000 ballots in largely Democratic Harris County, saying the Republicans failed to demonstrate that they were harmed by the votes cast at extra drive-through locations. It was one of two major election cases to see action on Monday. In both cases, courts sided against conservative challenges over voting in Democrat-friendly jurisdictions. But it might only foreshadow more legal challenges ahead, after the election. In Texas, GOP activist Steven Hotze brought the case alongside Harris County Republicans state Rep. Steve Toth, congressional candidate Wendell Champion and judicial candidate Sharon Hemphill. They contended the extra 10 drive-through stations violated state election law, in an argument that centered on the definition of curbside voting. The clerk for Harris County, Houston’s home, rebutted the conservatives’ argument on several fronts. but the issue of whether they had standing to sue apparently caught the attention of U.S. District Judge Hanen. […]

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$100 million botnet scheme earns Russian man 8 years in prison

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A U.S. judge sentenced a Russian national to eight years in prison over his role in stealing personal and financial information via a botnet conspiracy that aimed to generate an estimated $100 million. Prosecutors announced the sentence Monday for Aleksandr Brovko, who pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud. From 2007 to 2019, according to the Department of Justice, Brovko collaborated with other cybercriminals to turn data troves harvested by botnets — networks of infected computers — into cash. Brovko’s role was to write software scripts to go through botnet logs and conduct data searches to extract highly sensitive personal information and online banking credentials, as well as scout out the value of compromised accounts to determine whether they’d be worth using to conduct fraud. In all, prosecutors said, Brovko possessed and trafficked more than 200,000 “unauthorized access devices,” a term for credit cards, mobile identification […]

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Wisconsin Republicans say last minute hack cost party $2 million meant to reelect Trump

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Less than a week before Election Day in a vital swing state, Wisconsin Republicans said on Thursday that hackers made off with $2.3 million devoted to reelecting President Donald Trump. The Republican Party of Wisconsin said it first detected the attack on Oct. 22, then notified the FBI the following day about doctored invoices in the names of its vendors. “Cybercriminals, using a sophisticated phishing attack, stole funds intended for the re-election of President Trump, altered invoices and committed wire fraud,” the party’s chairman, Andrew Hitt, said in a statement. “These criminals exhibited a level of familiarity with state party operations at the end of the campaign to commit this crime.” It’s common for hacking victims to claim they were the victims of “sophisticated” attacks, whether the attacks were rudimentary or not. Hitt and a party spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions seeking further details, including any evidence the […]

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The lowly DDoS attack is still a viable threat for undermining elections

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Scenes like what happened to Florida’s voter registration site on Oct. 6 has played out over and over again: A system goes down, and questions fly. Was there a cyberattack, specifically a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack meant to overwhelm a website site with traffic, knocking it offline? Could there have been too many legitimate visitors rushing to the site to beat the voter registration deadline — that surged past what the system could handle? Or, was it something weirder, as in this case, like pop singer Ariana Grande urging fans on Twitter to register to vote? Florida’s chief information officer eventually blamed misconfigured computer servers. The incident, though, was one of several over the course of the past month that exposed ongoing anxieties about how cyberattacks, accidental outages and other technical failures could upend a polling place, or even an election. Few, if any, election security experts would rank the […]

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US sanctions Russian government institution in connection with Trisis malware

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The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned a Russian government research institute on Friday that it said was connected to the strain of destructive malware frequently labeled the most dangerous in the world. Known as Trisis or Triton, the malicious software is designed to target systems used to safely control emergency shutdowns of industrial plants. Last year, security researchers at Dragos determined that the hackers behind the tool had scanned the networks of U.S. electrical utilities, after the malware initially surfaced in 2017 at a Saudi petrochemical plant. The sanctions mark the first time any government has publicly connected Trisis to Russia. “In recent years, the Triton malware has been deployed against U.S. partners in the Middle East, and the hackers behind the malware have been reportedly scanning and probing U.S. facilities,” Treasury said it its sanctions announcement. “The development and deployment of the Triton malware against our partners is particularly troubling given the Russian government’s involvement in malicious […]

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EU slaps sanctions on GRU leader, Fancy Bear, FBI-wanted hacker over Bundestag attack

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The European Union on Thursday sanctioned the head of a Russian military intelligence unit, an alleged hacker wanted by the FBI and a Russian government-linked hacking group over a 2015 cyberattack against Germany’s parliament. It’s only the second time the EU has issued cyber-related sanctions, following July sanctions against Russia, China and North Korea in connection with a string of unrelated cyberattacks. Now, as then, the General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, commonly known as the GRU, is among the targets of the EU’s ire. Igor Kostyukov, head of the GRU, was hit with sanctions in Thursday’s action over the Bundestag hack. So, too, was alleged intelligence officer Dmitry Badin, previously indicted in the U.S. for his role in 2016 election interference. The EU also sanctioned the GRU-connected hacking group known as Fancy Bear, among other names, which the U.S. has likewise connected to 2016 election meddling. “The cyber-attack against the German federal parliament targeted the parliament’s information […]

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TrickBot really is on the run after Microsoft, Cyber Command disruption

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After some initial doubts, Tuesday brought encouraging signs that a multi-front attempt to dismantle the massive TrickBot botnet in advance of Election Day has taken root, perhaps thanks to an extra push. In recent weeks, a Pentagon hacking division and a coalition of organizations led by Microsoft took aim at TrickBot, one of of the world’s largest armies of zombie computers. Fears that attackers could use the botnet to deploy ransomware and disrupt the 2020 election motivated the takedown bids. Microsoft said on Tuesday that, as of the start of this week, it had disabled 120 out of 128 command-and-control servers the company identified as part of TrickBot’s infrastructure, good for a 94% takedown rate. Nearly 60 of the 128 sprung up as cybercriminals sought to fortify its infrastructure, after which Microsoft said it shut down all but one. “To be clear, these numbers will change regularly as we expect action we’ve already […]

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What the FBI did to make headway against COVID-19 research hackers

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As the FBI investigated alleged Chinese hacking of American COVID-19 research, it used information it found in known victims’ networks to identify others who had been victimized or potentially might be, according to a top bureau official. It was just one step of several in how the FBI confronted threats to that research, said Tonya Ugoretz, deputy assistant director in the bureau’s cyber division, speaking Tuesday at CyberTalks, a virtual summit hosted by Scoop News Group. The FBI’s role in defending vaccine makers and others combating the virus is part of a government-wide effort, which has included indictments and public joint agency warnings sounding the alarm that both China and Russia have been trying to steal U.S. research secrets. The FBI deployed personnel to aid hacking victims and those who faced attempted hacks with their consent, which allowed investigators to collect evidence to aid other potential victims. But that evidence also would be “valuable for any future […]

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