Chinese, Russian hacking groups spy on South Korea amid U.S.-North Korea peace talks

Ahead of the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore next week, U.S. cybersecurity researchers say that Russian and Chinese hackers are scaling up cyber-espionage operations against South Korea. Cybersecurity giant FireEye found that operations targeting South Korean government ministries and financial institutions were carried out as recently as last month. The firm uncovered multiple incidents of hacking attempts linked to Russian and Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) groups. The revelations underscore the complicated threat landscape facing Seoul. It is still unclear who exactly was targeted and whether the attackers succeeded in breaching important political organizations, FireEye researchers said. South Korea, a key U.S. ally, must play a delicate balancing act. It has vowed to pursue a diplomatic breakthrough and angled for a better relationship with its northern neighbor, but all bets are off in cyber space. As CyberScoop recently reported, despite Pyongyang and Seoul vowing to pacify the Korean Peninsula, the latter […]

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Chinese group said to use HackingTeam tools to spread ransomware, cryptominers

A sophisticated Chinese cybercrime group is using old, leaked computer code from a notorious cyber-arms dealer known as HackingTeam to breach thousands of companies, mostly based in Asia, according to new research by Israel cybersecurity firm Intezer. The latest observation shows how HackingTeam’s breach in 2015, when its wares leaked online for anyone to copy, is still having effects on global security. HackingTeam claims that it only sells its “lawful intercept” product to governments and law enforcement agencies, but prior investigations have shown the extent to which these tools are often abused by authoritarian regimes to target otherwise innocent dissidents. The 2015 leak provided these powerful capabilities to a wide array of people, including apparently cybercriminals. Intezer explained in a blog post published Tuesday that researchers first noticed a series of unique remote access trojans, cryptominers and ransomware variants for Windows, Linux and Android platforms while monitoring public data feeds. In addition, the group appears […]

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