Bite Sized Cyber Crime

The holiday season is a rather expensive time of year, not just with gift buying but with scams that take advantage of the season. One thing rather unexpected however, was a Christmas Eve update that drained the wallets of some TrustWallet users.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/NHqAjqzM

Most threat actors come and go with the times, not lasting more than a couple years. Prince of Persia was assumed to be one such group, but it turns out they not only returned but never left in the first place.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/9yJ1fxP3

Usually ransomware targets large entities, but as always no one is truly safe online. This specific malware targets individual android users sideloading apps from illegitimate sources.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/3J3uAVHt

CIS recently released an advisory warning of a stealthy backdoor that has been targeting VMWare shots and stealing data from snapshots of virtual machines. These are the details of that backdoor

Sources: https://pastebin.com/ppt9V3b1

In the security world it is becoming more and more necessarily to invest in controls around AI and the web browser. This attack targets both and often leaves absolutely no trace on your end, as the attack never leaves the browser.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/rz744p1b

Cloudflare had a massive outage on Tuesday morning that many suspected was some kind of big attack by nation state hackers, however it turns out to have been a lot more simple than that. A little internal error caused a domino effect that took out much of the web for several hours.

Sources: https://pastebin.com/ftmYtFv7

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