Microsoft catches Russian hackers targeting foreign embassies
Russian-state hackers are targeting foreign embassies in Moscow with custom malware that gets installed using adversary-in-the-middle attacks that operate at the ISP level, Microsoft warned Thursday. The campaign has been ongoing since last year. It leverages ISPs in that country, which are obligated to work on behalf of the Russian government. With the ability to control the ISP network, the threat group—which Microsoft tracks under the name Secret Blizzard—positions itself between a targeted embassy and the end points they connect to, a form of attack known as an adversary in the middle, or AitM. The position allows Secret Blizzard to send targets to malicious websites that appear to be known and trusted.
Gen Z Falls for Scams 2x More Than Older Generations
By some measures, young people are twice as likely to fall for cyberattacks than supposedly gullible old people are. Many assume that older people, by virtue of having less intimate knowledge of new technologies, are at proportionately greater risk of falling for online scams. However, recent data suggests that it’s younger people who are at greater risk, due to their online habits and also broader economic pressures.
Luxembourg probes reported attack on Huawei tech that caused nationwide telecoms outage
Luxembourg’s government announced on Thursday it was formally investigating a nationwide telecommunications outage caused last week by a cyberattack reportedly targeting Huawei equipment inside its national telecoms infrastructure. The outage on July 23 left the country’s 4G and 5G mobile networks unavailable for more than three hours. Officials are concerned that large parts of the population were unable to call the emergency services as the fallback 2G system became overloaded. Internet access and electronic banking services were also inaccessible.
Chinese Researchers Suggest Lasers and Sabotage to Counter Musk’s Starlink Satellites
Stealth submarines fitted with space-shooting lasers, supply-chain sabotage and custom-built attack satellites armed with ion thrusters. Those are just some of the strategies Chinese scientists have been developing to counter what Beijing sees as a potent threat: Elon Musk’ s armada of Starlink communications satellites. Chinese government and military scientists, concerned about Starlink’s potential use by adversaries in a military confrontation and for spying, have published dozens of papers in public journals that explore ways to hunt and destroy Musk’s satellites, an Associated Press review found.
After Backlash, ChatGPT Removes Option to Have Private Chats Indexed by Google
Following publication of this story, OpenAI removed all chats from Google search results, along with the checkbox in ChatGPT that enabled users to make them discoverable. When you search site:chatgpt.com/share on Google, there are no longer any results. The chats are still appearing in other search engines, such as Bing and DuckDuckGo, as of this writing since the feature is still “rolling out to all users,” says OpenAI CISO Dan Stuckey. (Here’s one where someone fights with the chatbot, and asks it about the history of political corruption.)
Hackers Regularly Exploit Vulnerabilities Before Public Disclosure, Study Finds
Many hackers are opportunistic and often attempt to exploit security gaps to launch an attack days before a vulnerability is disclosed. According to a new report published on July 31 by GreyNoise, attacker activity precedes the time a new vulnerability in edge devices is publicly disclosed and given a common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) number in 80% of cases. These pre-disclosure spikes of activity include scanning, brute forcing and exploitation attempts – although zero-day exploit attempts represent the majority of the activity observed. This activity can precede the CVE disclosure by up to six weeks, the GreyNoise researchers found.
