Tag Archive for: Cover

‘Russian-backed’ hackers defaced Ukrainian websites as cover for dangerous malware attack

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Malicious malware posing as ransomware has been discovered on multiple computer systems in the Ukraine following a hacking attack on Friday that targeted more than 70 government websites.

Hackers exploited a known vulnerability in a content management system used by government agencies and other organisations to deface websites with threatening messages written in Ukrainian, Polish and Russian.

The Ukrainian government has blamed a Russian-influenced hacking group for defacing government websites with messages warning Ukrainians “to expect the worst”.

But it emerged over the weekend that Friday’s attacks appeared to have been a distraction exercise to divert attention from more serious malware implanted on Ukrainian government and commercial computer systems.

Microsoft disclosed over the weekend that it had detected “destructive malware” on dozens of computer systems belonging to Ukrainian agencies and organisations, including IT companies, that work closely with the Ukrainian government.

The malware, first detected on 13 January 2020, masquerades as ransomware, but is designed to destroy information on infected computer systems without offering victims the ability to recover the data in return for a ransom payment.

Microsoft wrote in a blog post: “We do not know the current stage of this attacker’s operation cycle or how many other victim organisations exist in Ukraine or other geographic locations. However, it is unlikely that these impacted systems [discovered by Microsoft] represent the full scope of the impact.”

The attack comes at a time of heightened geopolitical tension between Russia and the West after warnings by western governments that the cyber attacks could be a precursor to military action by Russia, which has positioned 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border.

Russian influence

Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Olha Stefanishyna, speaking on the BBC World News, said she believed there was a “shadow of Russian influence” behind the cyber attacks impacting the country. “The cyber attacks are happening on a daily basis on websites of the Ukraine of a regional and central nature,” she said.

Jan Psaki, press secretary to the…

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The Financial Times and McKinsey’s best business books of 2021 cover pressing topics like global cybersecurity, climate change, and the opioid epidemic

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  • The Financial Times & McKinsey announced the best business book of 2021 on December 1.
  • Judges chose “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends” by journalist Nicole Perlroth.
  • Below, find this year’s shortlist — ranging in topics from the opioid epidemic to climate change.

The Financial Times and McKinsey have announced the winner and finalists for the 2021 Business Book of the Year award.

This year’s winner, “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends” by “New York Times” reporter Nicole Perlroth, delivers a crucial and thorough analysis of the cyber arms race, encountering hackers, spies, and criminals clamoring to infiltrate essential computer systems.

Intrepid journalist Nicole Perloth delves into cyber crime to create an urgent, alarming analysis of the threat posed by the cybercriminals arms race.

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“Nicole Perlroth has done something that hasn’t been done before: going this deep into the mysterious world of hackers,” Financial Times editor Roula Khalaf said in a press release. “Cyber security isn’t featuring highly enough on CEOs’ agenda. I hope this award will prompt them to read this book and pay attention.”

McKinsey’s Managing Partner Europe, Magnus Tyeman, echoed the importance and singularity of Perlroth’s book. “Nicole Perlroth has written a book that is more than just a timely wake-up call to the fact that the world has largely ignored the realities and profound implications of the arms race between hackers, cybercriminals and businesses and national governments,” Tyeman said. “It is an alarming book, one in which the author makes a compelling, granular and matter-of-fact case for how vulnerable global computer systems have become, even as it also comes with an urgent plea for specific and systematic action.”

Below, you’ll find the six books listed on this year’s shortlist — stacked with journalists and ranging in topics from the opioid epidemic (by the prolific author of “Say Nothing“) to racism, climate change, and meritocracy. 

The winner of the Business Book of the Year…

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How reporting on the Middle East prepared one journalist to cover Facebook

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For Sheera Frenkel, a New York Times reporter and the co-author of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination covering the social media giant was a result of “happenstance.” 

As a freelance foreign correspondent, Frenkel published her first big stories from Israel, although she actually got her start in South America. Frenkel, who speaks Hebrew and Arabic, moved to the Middle East in search of stories to report just before Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

“I left stuff with a friend in Argentina because I was so sure that I was just going to be gone for six months,” she recalled. “I have not been back to Argentina since then, and who knows what happened to my suitcases.”

She joined The New York Times in 2017, assigned to the cybersecurity beat. “I was very, very pregnant, and pretty much immediately after joining, I went on maternity leave,” Frenkel told Jewish Insider in a recent phone interview. The end of her maternity leave coincided with the departure of the paper’s Facebook beat reporter, who left to write his own book on the company. 

“They needed somebody that could fill in for a couple months while he was off writing his book,” Frenkel recalled. 

Four years later, Frenkel has become a must-follow reporter on the Facebook beat — an auspicious place to be, as news about the company’s pursuit of profit at all costs continues to emerge. Last week, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower,  testified to Congress about how Facebook executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, suppressed internal research demonstrating the harms of the company’s products, especially Instagram. Frenkel felt vindicated.

“It was, I would say, incredibly satisfying to see the receipts, in a way, for everything we had been told for years,” she said.  

In conversation with JI, Frenkel talked about what covering authoritarian governments taught her about the social media giant, how to use Facebook responsibly and why she separates her Jewish identity from her reporting. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. 

Jewish Insider: To start with recent…

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Malware and ransomware gangs have found this new way to cover their tracks

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Theres’s been a huge uptick in the proportion of malware using TLS or the Transport Layer Security to communicate without being spotted, cybersecurity firm Sophos reports. 

While HTTPS helps prevent eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks, and hijackers who try to impersonate a trusted website, the protocol has also offered cover for cybercriminals to privately share information between a website and a command and control server —  hidden from the view of malware hunters. 

“It should come as no surprise, then, that malware operators have also been adopting TLS … to prevent defenders from detecting and stopping deployment of malware and theft of data,” Sophos said.

Malware communications fall into three main categories: downloading more malware, exfiltration of stolen data, or command and control. All these types of communications can take advantage of TLS encryption to evade detection by defenders, the security company said.

According to Sophos, a year ago 24% of malware was using TLS to communicate but today that proportion has risen to 46%. 

Sophos said a large portion of the growth in overall TLS use by malware can be linked in part to the increased use of legitimate web and cloud services protected by TLS as unwitting storage for malware components, as destinations for stolen data, or even to send commands to botnets and other malware.

It also said it has seen an increase in the use of TLS use in ransomware attacks over the past year, especially in manually-deployed ransomware—in part because of attackers’ use of modular offensive tools that leverage HTTPS. 

“But the vast majority of what we detect day-to-day in malicious TLS traffic is from initial-compromise malware: loaders, droppers and document-based installers reaching back to secured web pages to retrieve their installation packages,” it said.

“We found that while TLS still makes up an average of just over two percent of the overall traffic Sophos classifies as “malware callhome” over a three-month period, 56 percent of the unique C2 servers (identified by DNS host names) that communicated with malware used HTTPS and TLS.”

One dropper it highlights is the…

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