Bite Sized Cyber Crime

The Shiny Hunters failed to extort Panera in a data theft attack and leaked the data found. Thankfully the damage seems rather minimal as the information is, for the most part, not all that sensitive.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/EXKcrrDL

They say never to pay a ransomware, but this one you should especially never pay because you will definitely not get anything back if you do. As it turns out vibe coding can lead to mistakes that end up with threat actors losing the keys to their own ransomware.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/VuSZpJKQ

Bug bounty programs are a good way to practice your hacking skills while contributing to the greater good, but unfortunately some people want the rewards without having the skills, which have resulted in cURL being overwhelmed by completely nonsensical AI slop bug reports.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/ZBdpci1U

Bluetooth is the standard these days for listening to audio but it presents some issues that wired doesn't, and I don't mean sound quality. Implementations of Bluetooth protocols can have vulnerabilities and when those hit it could mean you're being listened to.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/Kq9TieQC

Instagram users saw a barrage of password reset attempts on their accounts and it seems to be related to a dataset that was just leaked to BreachForums of scraped user data.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/AfMVFBDm

The holiday season is a rather expensive time of year, not just with gift buying but with scams that take advantage of the season. One thing rather unexpected however, was a Christmas Eve update that drained the wallets of some TrustWallet users.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/NHqAjqzM

Most threat actors come and go with the times, not lasting more than a couple years. Prince of Persia was assumed to be one such group, but it turns out they not only returned but never left in the first place.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/9yJ1fxP3

Usually ransomware targets large entities, but as always no one is truly safe online. This specific malware targets individual android users sideloading apps from illegitimate sources.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/3J3uAVHt

CIS recently released an advisory warning of a stealthy backdoor that has been targeting VMWare shots and stealing data from snapshots of virtual machines. These are the details of that backdoor

Sources: https://pastebin.com/ppt9V3b1

In the security world it is becoming more and more necessarily to invest in controls around AI and the web browser. This attack targets both and often leaves absolutely no trace on your end, as the attack never leaves the browser.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/rz744p1b

Cloudflare had a massive outage on Tuesday morning that many suspected was some kind of big attack by nation state hackers, however it turns out to have been a lot more simple than that. A little internal error caused a domino effect that took out much of the web for several hours.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/ftmYtFv7

We have our fears of AI taking over the world and killing all the humans, which we are still rather far from, however a more urgent worry is the use of AI automomous agents taking the place of hackers themselves. Once such group managed to offload 80% of the technical hacking work to Claude Code.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/PzTM7dZT

Last week we discussed a weird email sent to students, staff, alumni, or basically anyone associated with the University of Pennsylvania. This week some new developments in the case occurred that could leave data at risk, but the attacker's motivations and actions seem odd.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/GDKhPmrE

I learned how to generate censorship bleeps! But also a strange and vulgar email was sent out to alumni, donors, clients, staff, and current students from the University of Pennsylvania warning that a data leak was inevitable. But is there any substance?

Sources: https://pastebin.com/MbJwdrYA

We've talked about North Korean threat actors being hired for jobs in order to steal data, but what about North Korean threat actors hiring people to steal data? Seems backwards, but it's been going on for years and recently teh defense sector has become a target of these attacks.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/yrWK4K20

Discord is a popular chat app used by gamers, technologists, and even local communities. Recently however, it potentially had a very serious data breach involving the government identification of its users.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/1QJdNW5b

In many doomsday scenarios AI become sentient and try to kill mankind, but has this already started to happen? Many sensational headlines would lead you to believe so, but the answer is a little more complicated than that...

Sources: https://pastebin.com/sgjfdr8j

3 notorious hacking groups have teamed up to form one huge site threatening to extort 39 major organizations out of their Salesforce data, which was acquired through a series of phishing attacks. Though Salesforce was not actually a target themselves, they also face extortion and some reputational damage.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/jNr9Qsrr

Oh how the mighty have fallen. It takes a lot for a business to survive even 5 years after an attack, let alone 158. So what could kill such a strong business that clearly has it figured out? It turns out the Achilles heel is often just a single bad password.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/7M6vKycy