Category Archives: Hacking

FBI Shuts Down Chinese Botnet

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The FBI has shut down a botnet run by Chinese hackers:

The botnet malware infected a number of different types of internet-connected devices around the world, including home routers, cameras, digital video recorders, and NAS drives. Those devices were used to help infiltrate sensitive networks related to universities, government agencies, telecommunications providers, and media organizations…. The botnet was launched in mid-2021, according to the FBI, and infected roughly 260,000 devices as of June 2024.

The operation to dismantle the botnet was coordinated by the FBI, the NSA, and the Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF), according to a press release dated …

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The growing danger of visual hacking and how to protect against it

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In this Help Net Security interview, Robert Ramsey, CEO at Rain Technology, discusses the growing threat of visual hacking, how it bypasses traditional cybersecurity measures, and the importance of physical barriers like switchable privacy screens. Cou… Continue reading The growing danger of visual hacking and how to protect against it→

Iranian-linked hackers collaborate with ransomware affiliates, feds say

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The group’s side hustle may not have explicit permission from its Iranian government sponsor.

The post Iranian-linked hackers collaborate with ransomware affiliates, feds say appeared first on CyberScoop.

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On the Cyber Safety Review Board

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When an airplane crashes, impartial investigatory bodies leap into action, empowered by law to unearth what happened and why. But there is no such empowered and impartial body to investigate CrowdStrike’s faulty update that recently unfolded, ensnarling banks, airlines, and emergency services to the tune of billions of dollars. We need one. To be sure, there is the White House’s Cyber Safety Review Board. On March 20, the CSRB released a report into last summer’s intrusion by a Chinese hacking group into Microsoft’s cloud environment, where it compromised the U.S. Department of Commerce, State Department, congressional offices, and several associated companies. But the board’s report—well-researched and containing some good and actionable recommendations—shows how it suffers from its lack of subpoena power and its political unwillingness to generalize from specific incidents to the broader industry…

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North Korean hacker used hospital ransomware attacks to fund espionage

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Federal prosecutors announced the indictment Thursday of a North Korean hacker accused of carrying out ransomware operations that targeted American health care facilities and used the proceeds of those operations to fund espionage efforts against the U.S. military and defense contractors.  Rim Jong Hyok is accused of using malware developed by North Korea’s military intelligence […]

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Hacking Scientific Citations

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Some scholars are inflating their reference counts by sneaking them into metadata:

Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors’ names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the cited publication. These details are stored as metadata, not visible in the article’s text directly, but assigned to a digital object identifier, or DOI—a unique identifier for each scientific publication.

References in a scientific publication allow authors to justify methodological choices or present the results of past studies, highlighting the iterative and collaborative nature of science…

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