You may have seen the news reports this week that German prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for Dmitry Badin for a massive hack of the German Parliament that made headlines in 2016. The reports about the German arrest warrant all mention that German authorities "believe" that Badin is connected to the Russian GRU and its APT28 hacking group.

The folks over at Bellingcat have done their open source intelligence investigation thing, and provided a ton of evidence to show that Badin almost certainly is part of GRU... including the fact that he registered his 2018 car purchase to the public address of a GRU building. This is not the first time this has happened. A few years back, Bellingcat also connected a bunch of people to the GRU -- including some accused of hacking by the Dutch government -- based on leaked car registration info.

There's much, much more in the Bellingcat report, but the final paragraph really stands out. Bellingcat also found Badin -- again, a hacker who is suspected in multiple massive and consequential hacks, including of email accounts -- didn't seem to be all that careful with his own security:

The most surreal absence of “practice-what-you-breach” among GRU hackers might be visible in their lackadaisical attitude to their own cyber protection. In 2018, a large collection of hacked Russian mail accounts, including user name and passwords, was dumped online. Dmitry Badin’s email — which we figured out from his Skype account, which we in turn obtained from his phone number, which we of course got from his car registration — had been hacked. He had apparently been using the password Badin1990. After this, his email credentials were leaked again as part of a larger hack, where we see that he had changed his password from Badin1990 to the much more secure Badin990.

Yes, the password for at least one of his email accounts... was apparently his own last name and the year he was born. The cobbler's kids go shoeless again.

For those who care about data, the City’s new Open Data Master Plan is about to change everything.

One Saturday afternoon earlier this month, more than 100 people gathered at the Toronto Public Library for an annual gathering called CodeAcross, the city’s annual open data and civic tech event. This year, the theme was the Future of Work. One of the challenges centred on the City of Toronto’s freshly approved Open Data Master […]

The post Civic Tech: Hackers! To Your Stations! appeared first on Torontoist.

The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) yesterday issued a fresh advisory alerting organizations to change all their Active Directory credentials as a defense against cyberattacks trying to leverage a known remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Pulse Secure VPN servers—even if they have already patched it. The warning comes three months after another

A newly discovered unpatchable hardware vulnerability in Xilinx programmable logic products could allow an attacker to break bitstream encryption, and clone intellectual property, change the functionality, and even implant hardware Trojans. The details of the attacks against Xilinx 7-Series and Virtex-6 Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have been covered in a paper titled "The

A Chinese hacking group has been found leveraging a new exploit chain in iOS devices to install a spyware implant targeting the Uyghur Muslim minority in China's autonomous region of Xinjiang. The findings, published by digital forensics firm Volexity, reveal that the exploit — named "Insomnia" — works against iOS versions 12.3, 12.3.1, and 12.3.2 using a flaw in WebKit that was patched by

In a recent highly targeted BEC attack, hackers managed to trick three British private equity firms into wire-transferring a total of $1.3 million to the bank accounts fraudsters have access to — while the victimized executives thought they closed an investment deal with some startups. According to the cybersecurity firm Check Point, who shared its latest investigation with The Hacker News,

Days after cybersecurity researchers sounded the alarm over two critical vulnerabilities in the SaltStack configuration framework, a hacking campaign has already begun exploiting the flaws to breach servers of LineageOS, Ghost, and DigiCert. Tracked as CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652, the disclosed flaws could allow an adversary to execute arbitrary code on remote servers deployed in data

Criminal hackers have found ways around new security devices used for online banking.

In the past, we’ve all witnessed sim-jacking attacks that allow a hacker to impersonate the targeted victim to steal the phone number. Hackers can gain access to unauthorized information related to the victim using the vulnerability, ‘SimJacker’ was that vulnerability. Recently there’s a similar vulnerability that has popped up, which uses the same SMS-technology to […]

The post WIB Vulnerability: Sim-Card that Allows Hackers to Takeover Phones appeared first on ReadWrite.

Five alleged members of hacking group InfinityBlack got some unexpected visitors last week when Polish law enforcement arrested them.

Russia's GRU military intelligence service appears to have got hold of many emails from Chancellor Angela Merkel's constituency office in a 2015 hack attack on Germany's parliament, Der Spiegel magazine reported on Friday, without citing its sources. A spokesman for the German government had no immediate comment. Der Spiegel said federal criminal police and the federal cyber agency had been able to partially reconstruct the attack and found that two email inboxes from Merkel's office had been targeted.

Cyber attacks have labelled the number one threat to power and utility companies worldwide, a new EY report has found.

Back once again like the Renegade Master, the UK Tech Weekly Podcast is coming to you from its new, earlier-in-the-week time slot.

Host Scott Carey is joined by Tamlin Magee to talk about pirate-obsessed Nigerian hacking syndicates, and Charlotte Jee is on board to discuss the ethics of facial (and racial) recognition technology.

We wrap things up with an Elon Musk news roundup, from his latest bae to building bricks.

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Invitation Only Research Event

Event participants

Dr Ben Buchanan, Senior Faculty Fellow, Georgetown University Center for Security and Emerging Technology
Chair: Dr Lindsay Newman, Senior Research Fellow, US and Americas Programme, Chatham House

Wien : Toeplitz & Deuticke, 1886.

Halle (Saale) : Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina - Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften ; Stuttgart : Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 2019.

1. ‘Army won’t be deployed in Mumbai, will fight Covid-19 together’: Uddhav Thackeray  Hindustan Times
2. Maharashtra may extend lockdown to end of May, hints CM Uddhav Thackeray  Times of India
3. Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray announces compensation for kin of deceased  TIMES NOW
4. Restrict entry-exit of migrants in Maharashtra: Raj Thackeray  Deccan Chronicle
5. Uddhav Thackeray: You are the soldiers, no need for the Army  Mumbai Mirror
6. View Full coverage on Google News

The hackers have been using files and emails that warn about a new coronavirus strain to trick users into opening them. Doing so can secretly deliver malware to the victim's machine.

Watch out for suspicious interview requests. 'The main focus of this phishing campaign was stealing email account information of the victims, and finding information about their contacts/networks,' the cybersecurity experts at Certfa Lab warned on Wednesday.

The access was being sold on a Russian-language marketplace. The affected airport system was available on the open internet and may have been secured with a weak password.

With this exercise, the state’s new council of ministers — 33 cabinet and 10 state — has hit the maximum limit, capped at 15 per cent of the Vidhan Sabha strength of 288.

He said the CAA and the NRC were two different issues and his government will not allow the NRC to be implemented in the state.