Collaborate Disseminate
The former CrowdStrike executive and co-founder of Silverado Policy Accelerator says Americans need to understand Taiwan’s strategic value.
The post Dmitri Alperovitch on Taiwan, China and Putin’s probing cyberattacks appeared first on CyberScoop.
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The Russian government said today it arrested 14 people accused of working for “REvil,” a particularly aggressive ransomware group that has extorted hundreds of millions of dollars from victim organizations. The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said the actions were taken in response to a request from U.S. officials, but many experts believe the crackdown is part of an effort to reduce tensions over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to station 100,000 troops along the nation’s border with Ukraine. Continue reading At Request of U.S., Russia Rounds Up 14 REvil Ransomware Affiliates
CrowdStrike reported a total revenue of $178.1 million during the first quarter of fiscal year 2021, a massive uptick that coincided with ongoing concerns about the strength of the global economy during the coronavirus pandemic. In its quarterly earnings report released Tuesday, the Sunnyvale-based company said its $178.1 million in revenue marked an 85% increase over the $96.1 million during the same period last year. Much of that revenue came from product subscriptions, with executives suggesting that the sudden move to telecommuting boosted CrowdStrike’s presence in the market. The financial disclosure pertains to the period ending on April 30, 2020. Total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2020 was $152.1 million, the company said. “With both security administrators and end-users working from home, we believe the rapid shift to a remote workforce has helped increase our leadership,” chief executive George Kurtz said in a statement. “We achieved 88% [annual recurring […]
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U.S. indictments against individual Chinese soldiers accused of hacking various American targets have deterred those military personnel from conducting the same kinds of hacks again, according to the co-founder of a firm known for investigating nation-state activity. Digital infrastructure associated with alleged hackers charged in 2014, 2017 and 2018 essentially evaporated when charges in each case were made public, said Dmitri Alperovitch, who co-founded CrowdStrike, during a keynote speech Wednesday during the RSA security conference in San Francisco. Each of the groups — known as APT 1, APT 3, or Buyosec, and APT 10, respectively — has been associated with Chinese intelligence services or the People’s Liberation Army. “Everything associated with them disappeared,” Alperovitch said during a conversation with reporters after the presentation. He cautioned that, while other Chinese groups largely have remained active, the specific groups named in the indictments “vanished” in a way that was “remarkable.” Some of […]
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Chinese hackers took pains to cover their fingerprints in allegedly hacking credit monitoring agency Equifax in 2017, but a senior Department of Justice official says an indictment unsealed earlier this month shows the smokescreen didn’t work. “They’re always going to try to make our job harder,” John Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, said Monday at San Francisco CyberTalks presented by CyberScoop. “And they’re also going to try to give themselves a basis to deny what it is I think that we’re proving in these cases.” The charges against four officials in China’s People’s Liberation Army for allegedly stealing data on some 145 million Americans from Equifax show just how determined the hackers were in infiltrating a U.S. company (China’s foreign ministry rejected the allegations). The hackers routed their internet traffic through servers in nearly 20 countries, wiping the computer logs along the way in a bid to […]
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Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s chief technology officer and co-founder, has left the company to launch a nonprofit. The organization will be a nonpartisan “policy accelerator,” Alperovitch said in a tweet Wednesday. Under Alperovitch’s leadership, CrowdStrike has gained notoriety for attributing the 2016 Democratic National Committee breach to two Russian APT groups, known as Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear. In recent months, the company has dealt with accusations from President Donald Trump that CrowdStrike had participated in a coverup of the breach. That theory, which has been debunked, came to light last year when a memorandum about a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy became public. That call would later become central to the House of Representatives impeachment of Trump in December 2019. The company, which provides endpoint protection, incident response, and conducts threat intelligence research, went public on the Nasdaq last year. Since then, stock prices have been near flat, although CrowdStrike shares lost […]
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In unsealing charges Tuesday against 10 Chinese nationals, the Department of Justice showed its focus is on China’s civilian intelligence agency, which analysts say has become Beijing’s preferred arm for conducting economic espionage. The agency, the Ministry of State Security, is more professional and technical in its hacking operations than China’s People Liberation Army, according to CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch. “We have seen [the MSS], over the years, break into [corporate] organizations,” Alperovitch said Tuesday at an event hosted by The New York Times. “They were always better technically than the PLA.” After a landmark 2015 agreement between the United States and China not to steal intellectual property, Chinese activity in that vein tapered off for about a year, according to Alperovitch. Now, he said, it is back in full force. “[W]e’re seeing, on a weekly basis, intrusions into U.S. and other Western companies from Chinese actors,” with the MSS […]
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Two separate APT groups believed to have ties to the Russian government have been fingered in attacks against the Democratic National Committee. Continue reading DNC Hacked, Research on Trump Stolen