Hacking, Security & Privacy - Page 9

Anonymous announced the beginning of its cyberwar with Russia when Putin's forces started invading Ukraine, and now the collective has another update for the public.

Taking to its official Anonymous Twitter account, the hacking collective vowed that it would not stop its cyberwar with the Kremlin until Russia stops its aggression altogether. The recent update follows many previous updates of Anonymous revealing it had leaked the personal data of 120,000 Russian soldiers (April 3), and that it hacked the central bank of Russia and stole 35,000 files (March 24).

Notably, Anonymous has also claimed that it had hacked Russian streaming services Wink and Ivi and live TV channels such as Russia 24, Channel One, and Moscow 24 to broadcast war footage from Ukraine to show Russian citizens the horrors of Putin's invasion. Furthermore, the hacking collective said that it had infiltrated a censorship agency, government, corporate, and news websites.

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.

The models were able to generate a list of the most to least likely candidates for a given day of activity, in which the top ten most likely candidates contained the correct user 75% of the time. The researchers warn that software with access to standard activity logs could reasonably predict a user's identity, even when logged out, and without access to conversations or behaviors from within apps.

The losses come following Apple's privacy changes that went into effect in April 2021.

The changes Apple made to iOS made it so that users must opt-in to allow ad-tracking by social media applications instead of an opt-out from it being enabled by default. Rather than an opt-out option being relegated to deep in the settings menu, a pop-up now appears before opening an app that uses advertising and data collection.

Meta Platforms CFO David Wehner estimates that the privacy changes cost the company $10 billion in revenue. When comparing market values from April 26th, 2021 to the present, Meta Platforms has lost $205 billion, Snap has lost $51 billion, Twitter has lost $26 billion, and Pinterest has lost $33 billion, for a combined $315 billion in market value losses.

A married US couple has been arrested on espionage-related charges, with Jonathan and Diana Toebbe, both of Annapolis, Maryland arrested in Jefferson County, West Virginia by the FBI and Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) after they tried to sell data on nuclear-powered warships to a foreign government.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland explains: "The complaint charges a plot to transmit information relating to the design of our nuclear submarines to a foreign nation. The work of the FBI, Department of Justice prosecutors, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Department of Energy was critical in thwarting the plot charged in the complaint and taking this first step in bringing the perpetrators to justice".

The couple are in big sh*t, with Jonathan Toebbe being an employee of the Department of the Navy, where he was a nuclear engineer and worked on the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, which is known as the Naval Reactors. Toebbe had an active national security clearance through the US Department of Defense, which let him have access to the Restricted Data he tried to sell to a foreign government.

Today couldn't get worse for Facebook, with the world's largest social media company down right now, and a Facebook whistleblower exposing some dark sides to the Mark Zuckerberg-led company.

Now, this is where things get worse: over 1.5 billion users have had their information up for sale on a hacker forum, with the personal data of over 1.5 billion Facebook users now up for grabs. You can buy it right now, either in a lump -- 1.5 billion users' information -- or maybe you just want 17 million users' information.

1 million accounts would cost you $5000 or so, which means 1.5 billion Facebook users' data is only going to cost you $7.5 million. Today, of all days, where Facebook has gone down, a whistleblower has exposed the social media giant, and their stock price is crashing... 1,500,000,000 users' data gets leaked and goes up for sale.

There's a new trojan going around that is now targeting gamers, known as "BloodyStealer" that is attacking gaming services like Bethesda, Epic Games, GOG, EA Origin, Steam, Telegram, and VimeWorld

BloodyStealer is able to take gamers' data including passwords, credit card details, screenshots, cookies, and client sessions from the above gaming services. The malware was discovered back in March 2021 in an advertisement on an underground forum, according to Kaspersky.

The malware has built-in protections to defend itself against analysis and has already been deployed in Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region. Kaspersky notes that the sellers of BloodyStealer are selling the "malware-as-a-service (MaaS) distribution model" which costs $10 per month, or $40 as a lifetime license.

The elite have always had the attitude of "rules for thee, but not for me" but Facebook is in trouble, yet again, this time with its now-not-so-secret XCheck program.

Facebook's internal XCheck program lets whitelisted users break the same rules that would otherwise see a regular user, or someone on the opposite side of the political spectrum, get banned. XCheck, otherwise known as just Cross Check, has improved quality control when it comes to moderation from high-profile users like celebrities, and politicians.

XCheck is meant to see posts made by whitelisted users get flagged, and have them routed through better-trained moderators to make sure that Facebook's rules are upheld and enforced. Instead, XCheck users -- some 5.8 million of them -- were being protected in 2020. Just 10% of the posts that were flagged for XCheck got reviewed, according to a document witnessed by The Wall Street Journal.

ProtonMail has been busted holding onto the IP addresses of a French climate activity, as well as their browser fingerprint -- after Swiss authorities requested the data.

ProtonMail is meant to have end-to-end encryption by default, but it didn't -- the company states "By default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account". But we now know that's not true, and the company has since updated its privacy policy.

After the company sent over the metadata of the French activity, ProtonMail then removed the portion of its policy that said the company didn't log IP addresses. In its place, is "ProtonMail is email that respects privacy and puts people (not advertisers) first".

Clubhouse was all the rage... if you could get into it -- but it seems that those who did, have now had not just their phone number leaked but the phone numbers of their entire synced contact list.

3,800,000,000+ phone numbers have just leaked onto the Darknet, yeah -- 3.8 billion phone numbers.

The full phone number database of Clubhouse hit the Darknet, up for sale to the highest bidder. This means that even if you didn't join up or use Clubhouse, your phone number is probably included in that list on the Darknet. The reason is that all Clubhouse users' phone contacts were synced into the "secret database" of Clubhouse.

The White House has blamed China for several cyberattacks aimed at Microsoft's business email server, the Microsoft Exchange Server.

According to the White House website, the US, along with other allies such as the European Union, the United Kingdom, and NATO, are revealing how the People's Republic of China (PRC) has been conducting malicious cyber activity that is endangering national security. The statement from the White House says that the PRC has been using "contract hackers," and due to the lack of interest China has in taking responsibility for the hacks and stopping them, it's believed that they are intentional.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently published four indictments for four Chinese nationals over a hacking campaign that occurred between 2011 and 2018. The DOJ website states that the hacking campaign targeted the following industries; aviation, defense, education, government, health care, biopharmaceutical, and maritime. Additionally, the hackers obtained trade secrets, chemical formulas, sensitive technologies, proprietary genetic-sequencing technology.

Ransomware has become a big deal with the recent attack on the US by a Russian-linked hacking group that was carried out on July 4.

Atlas VPN, a free VPN app, has posted an update to its blog where it states that with data it has acquired, "31% of businesses in the US are forced to close down as a consequence of falling victim to ransomware attacks." For those that don't know, ransomware is a form of malware where an individual threatens to publish personal data of a victim that is then forced into paying the individual, either for access to the data or for it not to be published.

Atlas VPN states that the data provided here has been sourced from Cybereason, who surveyed 1,263 cybersecurity professionals in April 2021. Of those 1,263 cybersecurity professionals, it was found that companies between 500+ employees were most likely to fall victim to ransomware (30%), followed by companies with 250-500 employees (23%), "100-249 employees (25%), 50-99 employees (11%), 10-49 employees (10%), and fewer than 10 people (1%)."