The ransomware gang responsible for targeting Taiwanese PC manufacturer MSI has leaked the private code signing keys of the company available on their darkweb leak site. The attack, orchestrated by the group known as Money Message, was announced in early April: The group revealed that they had successfully breached the systems of MSI, a multinational IT corporation renowned for its production and distribution of motherboards and graphics cards worldwide, including in the USA and Canada. MSI is headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan.
It is reported that initially, the criminal group demanded a ransom from MSI, threatening to publish the stolen files if their demands were not met by a specified deadline. However, the group has eventually exposed MSI’s private code signing keys on their darkweb leak site. These keys are of significant importance as they are used to authenticate the legitimacy and integrity of software and firmware updates released by the company. Malicious actors could potentially misuse these keys to distribute malware or carry out other malicious activities, putting MSI’s customers at risk. The company now faces the daunting task of mitigating the potential fallout from this exposure and bolstering their cybersecurity measures to prevent further unauthorized access.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has launched a project to explore the practices and choices of malicious actors when they decide to use the domain names of certain registrars over others. The project, called Inferential Analysis of Maliciously Registered Domains (INFERMAL), will systematically analyse the preferences of cyberattackers and possible measures to mitigate malicious activities across top-level domains (TLDs). It is funded as part of ICANN’s Domain Name System (DNS) Security Threat Mitigation Program, which aims to reduce the prevalence of DNS security threats across the Internet.
The team leading the project intends to collect and analyse a comprehensive list of domain name registration policies pertinent to would-be attackers, and then use statistical modelling to identify the registration factors preferred by attackers. It is expected that the findings of the project could help registrars and registries identify relevant DNS anti-abuse practices, strengthen the self-regulation of the overall domain name industry, and reduce the costs associated with domain regulations. The project would also help increase the security levels of domain names and, thus, the trust of end-users.
Data poisoning is a new type of cyber-attack aimed at misleading AI systems. AI is developed by processing huge amounts of data. The quality of data impacts the quality of AI. Data poisoning is the intentional supply of wrong or misleading data to impact the quality of AI. Data poisoning is becoming particularly risky with the development of Large Language Models (LLM) such as ChatGPT.
Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Google, NVIDIA and Robust Intelligence have recently published a preprint paper investigating the feasibility of data poisoning attacks against machine learning (ML) models used in artificial intelligence (AI). They injected corrupted data into an existing training data set in order to influence the behaviour of an AI algorithm that is being trained on it. It impacted the functionality of AI systems.
As AI systems are becoming more complex and massive, the detection of data poisoning attacks will be difficult. The main risks are in dealing with politically charged topics.
The Commonwealth has recently released its first issue of a cybercrime journal to draw attention to policy-influencing articles and commentary by academics, policymakers, practitioners, and experts exploring significant cybercrime and cybersecurity issues. This first issue underscores regional cybercrime trends in Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the UK, highlighting on a thematic front artificial intelligence (AI) in judicial decision-making in criminal matters; the co-dependency between cybercrime and organised crime; and data privacy concerns in relation to bring-your-own-device (BYOD) working practices, among other topics.
Private US company Chainalysis is a leading company in collecting and analyzing data used on cryptocurrency blockchains. In its annual report on cryptocurrency-related crime, they point out that illicit cryptocurrency volumes reach all-time highs amid a surge in sanctions and hacking.
‘Overall, the share of all cryptocurrency activity associated with illicit activity has risen for the first time since 2019, from 0.12% in 2021 to 0.24% in 2022.’ The company assesses that an equivalent of $20.6B is used for illicit activities.
A big part of that sum comes from the offenses related to the economic sanctions on Russia. This shows that a strict regime of sanctions is efficiently imposed on cryptocurrency exchanges, by the US department of the treasury, and international financial institutions. The report describes methods that are used for money laundering and fund transfers. As a key takeaway, Chainalisys points out that the impact of crypto sanctions depends on the jurisdiction and technical constraints.
Ransomware crypto payments
The report shows a decline in ransomware from 2021. Chainalisys claims that ransomware victims increasingly refuse to pay the ransom money hence pushing the criminals out of this scheme. The report is stating that “meaningful disruptions against ransomware actor groups are driving lower than expected successful extortion attempts” In 2021, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued an advisory document about the risk of ‘sanction crimes’ that can rise from ransomware payments. OFAC advises all US companies to report ransomware to the FBI prior to any action. This is also considered to be one of the factors for the drop in ransomware payments. In addition, ransomware lifespan is significantly shorter. From 470 days in 2019, it is down to 70 days in 2022.
Money laundering
The report is stating a rise in money laundering activities from $14.2B in 2021 to $23.8B in 2022. The report is stating ‘underground money laundering services’ are a growing concern. Such groups use private channels on messaging apps to set and organise private transactions that are hard to track.
Cryptocurrency scams
Cryptocurrency scams and the use of cryptocurrency on darknet markets are on the decline compared to previous years.
A recent report by Dragos, a cybersecurity company, highlights the rise in ransomware attacks agains critical infrastructure and, in particular, against the manufacturing systems. The report shows that the manufacturing sector had at least 437 ransomware attacks in 2022, accounting for more than 70% of these disruptive attacks that industrial organisations had experienced the previous year.
The company identified a total of 605 ransomware attacks affecting the industrial sector in 2022, a 92% increase over the 315 attacks detected in 2021.
The report also epxlores the activity of two threat groups – Chernovite and Bentonite – that focus on attacking the industrial sector. While Chernovite targets electric, liquid, and natural gas companies in Europe and the USA, Bentonite mainly focuses on attacking maritime oil and gas companies, governments, and the manufacturing sector.
The UK raises concern over an alleged information-gathering operation that has targeted numerous actors in government, politics, education, defence, journalism, and activism, carried out by a hacking group with ties to Russia called Cold River.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a division of the British government’s GCHQ spy agency, warned that Cold River conducts research on its targets and impersonates others in their near area using false email accounts and social media profiles. The Russian embassies in London and Washington did not immediately answer email requests for comments on the NCSC’s remarks. The Russian government was not specifically named as the source of the cyberattacks in the advisory.
The US Department of Justice announced that it seized the networks of a major international ransomware variant named Hive. The Hive ransomware was responsible for extorting and attempting to extort millions of dollars from victims in the USA and around the world, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland stated. More than 1,500 victims worldwide were targeted, including hospitals, schools, financial firms, and critical infrastructure, with an estimated loss of more than $150 million.
Cobalt Sapling, an Iranian threat actor, has been seen developing a new identity known as ‘Abraham’s Ax’ to use Saudi Arabia as political leverage.
The information was discovered by cybersecurity researchers at Secureworks’ Counter Threat Unit (CTU), who released an advisory about the new threat on January 26. Secureworks stated that the development of Abraham’s Ax and its attacks on Saudi government ministries illustrate its political intentions in a report emailed to Infosecurity.
