Cyber Bites

An alert warning has been sent out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation warning of threat actors abusing misconfigured SonarQube application in order to steal source code form US government agencies as well as private businesses. An alert sent out last month by the FBI was made public on their website this week detailing the intrusions which have taken place since at least April 2020. The alert provides a warning to the owners of SonarQube,...

This week UK residence have been targeted by an advanced HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) tax rebate text messages (SMS) scam. The smishing campaign (phishing scam via SMS) is especially worrying as it employs multiple HMRC phishing domains and tactics with the scam evolving by adding new domains daily as older domains get flagged by spam filters. The smishing scam is especially effective as it mimics HMRC's web interface meticulously, while also having the entire...

Earlier this month the ransomware gang DoppelPaymer released unencrypted data that they have stolen from Hall County, Georgia during a cyberattack. The attack affected Hall County's networks and phone system. At the time of the attack, there were no signs that the unencrypted data had been stolen by the hackers.  A spokesperson for Hall County said that "at this time, there is no evidence to show that citizen or employee data has been compromised. However,...

A large number of universities, including Standford University and the University of Oxford, are suffering from cyber attacks in which their email accounts are hijacked. Once hijacked the emails accounts are then used to trick the victims into exposing their email credentials and even installing malware. CEO and co-founder of INKY, Dave Bagget, said that there are no signs of how the emails accounts are being compromised. However, he believes that the victims of the...

The US Cyber Command has recently revealed information about the malware implants used by Russian hackers to target national parliaments, ministries of foreign affairs, and embassies. The malware was identified by the US Cyber Command's Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF) unit, alongside the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The information was uploaded yesterday to the Virus Total online virus scan platform. The CISA published two advisories in association with the CNMF and the FBI...

Microsoft has recently revealed that they discovered that Iranian state-sponsored attackers hacked into the emails accounts of a number of high-profile individuals and attendees at the 2020 Munich Security Conference and the Think 20 summit. It is thought that the attackers successfully targetted more than 100 individuals and Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) have linked them to the Iranian-backed hacking group tracked by the company as Phosphorus (as known as APT 35, Magic Hound and...

Yesterday Home Depot customers in Canada reported being sent hundreds of emails containing other customers order details. Some customers have received upwards of 600 'order ready for pickup' emails, all of which were for different orders. This is a serious data leakages as the orders were not associated with the customers Home Depot accounts that they were sent to. The emails contain personal data such as customers' names, ordered items, order numbers and even partial...

True is a social networking app which promises to 'protect your privacy'. However, they recently experienced a security lapse which exposed one of their serves, resulting in the leakage of users private data, available on the internet for anyone to see. The data leak happened after one of the app's dashboards databases was exposed to the internet without a password meaning that anyone was able to read, search or browse the database at will, including...

The New Hartford Central School district is currently trying to discover who is responsible for a hack on their virtual classroom system. Last week a hacker posing as a student entered a health class where they played loud noises across the speakers and posted a pornographic video which all the students in the virtual classroom could see. The incident sparked outrage among district faculty and parents of Ralph Perry Junior- High School where the hack...

Donal Trump's presidential re-election campaign website was briefly highjacked on Tuesday by hackers who defaced the site. The highjacking lasted less than 30 minutes, although hackers still managed to take over the site despite law enforcement and intelligence agencies being on high alert for digital interferences leading up to the election next week. Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign said in a statement that they can confirm that the site was defaced and...