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In Episode 15 of the Cybersecurity & Geopolitical Podcast from Security magazine, hosts Ian Thornton-Trump and Philip Ingram discuss current developments in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, geopolitical shifts in global intelligence, and app-based data collection.
Four critical infrastructure organizations in a South East Asian country were targeted in an intelligence-gathering campaign that continued for several months, Symantec Threat Hunter Team has found. Among the organizations targeted were a water company, a power company, a communications company, and a defense organization, with evidence the attackers were interested in information about SCADA systems.
Indeed, over the past few years, ransomware operators have shifted tactics, moving from widespread targeting intended to collect smaller ransoms from several entities to being more selective in what organizations are targeted and setting larger ransom amounts. One recent tactic revealed ransomware operators using virtual machine to evade detection, which was quickly adopted by other groups.
ESET researchers discovered a previously undocumented backdoor and document stealer used for cyber-espionage. ESET has been able to attribute the program, dubbed Crutch by its developers, to the infamous Turla APT group. It was in use from 2015 until at least early 2020. ESET has seen Crutch on the network of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a country of the European Union, suggesting that this malware family is only used against very specific targets. These tools were designed to exfiltrate sensitive documents and other files to Dropbox accounts controlled by Turla operators.
As the 2020 U.S. presidential election nears, there has been a rise in mercenary hacking groups and cyber espionage. Some say this a direct result of the current administrations’ increasingly isolationist global foreign policy, and that the U.S.’ status in the global cyber domain should be a major discussion point before November.
