Bite Sized Cyber Crime

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

Spear phishing can potentially get even more realistic with the use of generative AI. Recently North Korean threat actors leveraged prompt injection to create surprisingly realistic South Korean military documents

Sources: https://pastebin.com/H4qH2YuK

Supply chain attacks are one of the most devastating if done right, and one of the biggest in the history of NPM just occurred. However it was probably less fruitful than the attackers were hoping...

Sources: https://pastebin.com/GfquiVgZ

Tech giants have been collecting a lot of data on us for years with the use of cookies, and though efforts have been made to reduce this they have been futile. France recently fined Google hundreds of millions for cookie consent violations, but it may only be a minor cost of business to them.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/GkPf9W1c

Usually in phishing cases, you are emailed by the attackers first, but can attackers lie in wait for you to email them first? Surprisingly, yes. How is this even possible? Find out today!

Sources: https://pastebin.com/4b2vsrwH

Everyone may get elaborate revenge fantasies but few follow through due to the bad outweighing the satisfaction. One man, sensing he was to be terminated soon, however, decided if he were to go he would try to take the whole company down with him. Last week he was sentenced to 4 years in prison.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/Pi0YSFUt

Water and energy are both critical resources to society. In a display of fear, pro-Russia hacktivists compromised a dam in Norway remotely, demonstrating that cyberattacks can have very physical implications.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/mwwrPwtR

The UK recently proposed the banning of public sector organizations from paying ransomware ransoms, in an effort to discourage cybercriminals from targeting them. How may this end up working out though?

Sources: https://pastebin.com/37jGGd9X

CISA has developed many interesting and powerful tools over the year for cybersecurity, but recently they made one of malware analysis and automation open source and available for the public to use. Thorium. Let's talk about what this tool can do.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/zhmAvguE

An Arizona woman was arrested for running a North Korean IT worker laptop farm out of her home, and this gave us a little look into the strange world of how these threat actors are able to infiltrate US organizations.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/qvrWirYa

FIDO is the passwordless authentication set of protocols of the future, however that doesn't mean it's perfect and as cyber defenders attack, so do attackers. This novel exploit isn't a flaw within FIDO exploit but does threaten improperly implemented versions of it.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/fmUZEBAM

With cars becoming just another type of computer, and having rather complicated implementations, vulnerabilities in one system are major. A recent series of vulnerabilities discovered in OpenSynergy's BlueSDK could prove dangerous.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/5JHAyuAV