Hacking, Security & Privacy News - Page 6

Anonymous has continued its hacking crusade against Russian institutions in response to the country's invasion of Ukraine.

On February 25th, the Anonymous collective posted to its Twitter account that it "is officially in a cyber war against the Russian government." Since then, it has claimed to have hacked the Central Bank of Russia, and now claims to have gained access to CCTV within the Kremlin itself.

Posted on April 6th, the surveillance footage has yet to be independently verified, but allegedly shows Russian officials working inside the Kremlin. Hackers operating on behalf of Anonymous, using the Twitter handle @Thblckrbbtworld was quoted saying "we won't stop until we reveal all of your secrets. You won't be able to stop us. Now we're inside the castle, Kremlin."

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced that Kaspersky anti-virus software is a "national security threat".

The announcement from the US regulator comes only weeks after Germany's Federal Office for Information Security advised all citizens to avoid downloading and installing Kaspersky as the regulator found doubt in the "reliability of the manufacturer." Relatively the same statements have echoed from the FCC, that have now added Kaspersky to its list of "communications equipment and services that pose an unacceptable risk to national security".

When Germany advised against Kaspersky, the anti-virus company responded by denying any ties to the Russian government or any other government and that the decision made by Germany's cybersecurity agency was politically charged and wasn't based on a technical analysis of Kaspersky's products. Kaspersky is a Russian multinational cybersecurity and anti-virus firm that has its corporate headquarters in Moscow and operates a holdings company in the United Kingdom.

The Central Bank of the Russian Federation, or the Central Bank of Russia has reportedly been hacked by the international hacking collective Anonymous.

The Anonymous TV Twitter account took announced on March 24 that the Anonymous collective has "hacked the Central Bank of Russia" and has taken control of 35,000 files that contain "secret agreements". The Twitter post states that Anonymous will be releasing the large quantity of files in 48 hours, but didn't mention what the contents of the documents.

Anonymous announced at the end of February that it would be launching operations against the Russian Federation and that it will be targeting the Russian government. At the beginning of March a hacker group affiliated with Anonymous called "NB65" successfully hacked the Control Center of the Russian Space Agency "Roscosmos" and took control over the Kremlin's own spy satellites. Roscosmos denied claims of its control center being hacked.

Since Putin began his invasion into Ukraine, the Kremlin have been hit with sanctions, essentially removing Russia from the world economy.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin has condemned the sanctions imposed on his country, declaring them "akin to a declaration of war" while also indicating that he wants his revenge for the impact the sanctions have caused. According to Democratic Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado, who is a lawyer, veteran, and serves on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems, Putin may turn to one of the only strengths he has left, cyber-warfare.

Crow spoke to Newsweek, where he explained one of the biggest tools that Putin has at his disposal is cyber-warfare and that to seek out his revenge against the sanctions imposed on Russia, he may initiate cyber-attacks on the United States and its allied countries. Crow believes these attacks could be carried out in the "weeks and months ahead" and that "we can expect Putin to come at our financial system and some of our critical infrastructure."

The announcement by Ukraine authorities was made via Telegram where the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) announced it had detained a "hacker".

According to the Telegram announcement the hacker provided "the occupiers with mobile communications in Ukraine" by sending SMS messages to Ukrainian officials and civil servant officers offering them surrender terms. Additionally, the SSU alleges that this hacker also relayed military commands and instructions to Russian invaders.

The Ukrainian security agency said that in a 24 hour period the hacker made up to 1,000 calls and that some of these calls were with top Russian leadership. Ukrainian officials have captured the hacker and released blurred images of the individuals face while also not revealing any name or identifying information. The equipment used by the hacker has been seized by Ukrainian authorities and will be used as evidence, with the SSU stating that he would be "held accountable for all the severity of the law."

A group of hundreds of thousands of hackers has been formed together to launch digital attacks against Russia.

A report from The Guardian reveals a group on the Telegram chat app titled "IT Army of Ukraine", which features around 300,000 members. Each of the group members are assigned tasks to digitally fight Vladimir Putin, with some attacks being successful as the group has caused interruptions for Russian web services, websites for Russia's lower house of parliament, sites for state-owned media service providers, a selection of banks and a large energy company called Gazprom.

Alp Toker, the director of NetBlocks, an internet connectivity watchdog, said that the group of hackers has been successful in taking down state-owned media websites. Mykhailo Fedorov, the Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, has made a public call for "digital talents" by posting onto his personal Twitter a link to the Telegram ground and stating "we are creating an IT army", and "there will be tasks for everyone".

A group of hackers has announced via Twitter that they have infiltrated Russia's command center for its spy satellites.

The hacking group goes by the name "NB65", and is reportedly affiliated with the infamous hacking group Anonymous. According to reports, NB65 has successfully shut down the control center of the Russian Space Agency "Roscosmos", and as a result, Russia no longer has control of its own spy satellites. In response to these claims, Russian space agency head Dmitry Rogozin announced that Russia was still in control of its control center and that the claims were false.

Read more: Russia threatens to crash the ISS into US, top NASA official answers

I'm sure you're well aware of what is happening between Russia and Ukraine right now, but then we have hacking collective Anonymous, reportedly kicking off an operation against the Russian government and Vladimir Putin.

I'll stay out of the politics of this as I'm just reporting the news, but Anonymous is reportedly pushing into a "full-scale" cyberattack against the Russian Federation. The operation by Anonymous is targeting the Russian government, adding that "there is an inevitability that the private sector will most likely be affected too".

Anonymous continues: "Put yourselves in the shoes of the Ukrainians being bombed right now. Together we can change the world, we can stand up against anything. It is time for the Russian people to stand together and say "NO" to Vladimir Putin's war".

A study on the vulnerability has been published in the ACM MobiCom Conference and will be presented by the researchers at the upcoming International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking in March.

Voice interactions are becoming more prevalent in VR and AR as they branch out into applications beyond gaming, compared to traditional handheld-controller interactions. Researchers from Rutgers University showed that hackers could access the built-in motion sensors on face-mounted virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets in an eavesdropping attack.

Their attack, Face-Mic, captures speech-associated subtle facial dynamics from these zero-permission motion sensors and infer sensitive information from live human speech, such as speaker gender, identity, and speech content. Using a deep-learning-based approach and four mainstream VR headsets, the team validated the generalizability, effectiveness, and high accuracy of Face-Mic in extracting speech information.

A study on users' smartphone and app usage has been published in the journal Psychological Science.

Researchers from Lancaster University and the University of Bath in the United Kingdom analyzed 4,680 days worth of app usage data from 780 people's smartphones, creating models of their daily app usage patterns. They then tested whether the models could identify individuals based on only one day of anonymous smartphone usage activity.

"Our models, which were trained on only six days of app usage data per person, could identify the correct person from a day of anonymous data one third of the time," said Dr. Ellis from the University of Bath.