‘Machete’ cyber-espionage group goes after military in Venezuela

In March, there were massive, days-long power outages in Venezuela, causing several fatalities and pushing the South American country into turmoil that has continued to the present day. Around the same time as the first outages, a cyber-espionage group — dubbed “Machete” by ESET — began siphoning off gigabytes of confidential documents from Venezuela’s military in a successful campaign that is ongoing, according to new research from ESET. While there are some compromised computers in Ecuador, Colombia, and Nicaragua, the primary focus is Venezuela, as over half of the compromised computers in the campaign belong to the Venezuelan military, according to the Slovakian cybersecurity company. ESET researchers write that until May of this year, more than 50 computers were actively communicating with the attackers’ command and control server and bleeding gigabytes-worth of data each week. The toolset used by Machete is capable of stealing documents commonly used in the office […]

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Anonymous offshoots rush to avenge Assange arrest with cyberattacks

Hackers have launched a series of uncoordinated cyberattacks against British and Ecuadorian targets over the past week in apparent retaliation for the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. A member of a group calling itself the Philippine Cyber Eagles, an Anonymous offshoot with fewer than 20 Twitter followers as of Friday morning, earlier this week released a 44 MB file containing documents purportedly stolen from police agencies throughout the United Kingdom. The file does not appear to contain personal information, though it does include spreadsheets, press releases, and Microsoft Excel files dated from February 2019. That data dump came on the same day another self-described Anonymous group claimed to knock offline Police.UK, a Home Office website, with a distributed denial-of-service attack — a blunt digital assault technique that overwhelms sites with falsified traffic. Other groups launched similar attacks against town councils in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and Bedale, located north of Leeds. […]

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US Government Admits It Doesn’t Know If Assange Cracked Password For Manning

An FBI agent admitted in a newly unsealed court document that the Department of Justice does not know whether Assange’s offer to help Manning came to fruition. Continue reading US Government Admits It Doesn’t Know If Assange Cracked Password For Manning

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange arrested in London

By Uzair Amir
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, 47, has been arrested by Met Police from the embassy of Ecuador in London after seven years of refuge over a now dropped case of sexual assault. The arrest took place after Ecuadorian president Lenin More… Continue reading Wikileaks founder Julian Assange arrested in London

If Your iPhone is Stolen, These Guys May Try to iPhish You

KrebsOnSecurity recently featured the story of a Brazilian man who was peppered with phishing attacks trying to steal his Apple iCloud username and password after his wife’s phone was stolen in a brazen daylight mugging. Today, we’ll take an insider’s look at an Apple iCloud phishing gang that appears to work quite closely with organized crime rings — within the United States and beyond — to remotely unlock and erase stolen Apple devices.

Victims of iPhone theft can use the Find My iPhone feature to remotely locate, lock or erase their iPhone — just by visiting Apple’s site and entering their iCloud username and password. Likewise, an iPhone thief can use those iCloud credentials to remotely unlock the victim’s stolen iPhone, wipe the device, and resell it. As a result, iPhone thieves often subcontract the theft of those credentials to third-party iCloud phishing services. This story is about one of those services. Continue reading If Your iPhone is Stolen, These Guys May Try to iPhish You