Olympus Is Recovering From a Reported Ransomware Attack

Singapore telco exposed data of 80K customers, Supposed Pentagon cybersecurity pilot program disappeared as mysteriously as it began, TikTok aggressively booting educational hacking videos, more

Sep 13

Check out my latest column, which explains the next steps in zero trust requirements for federal agencies contained in the Biden administration’s ambitious cybersecurity executive order.

Japanese manufacturer of optics and reprography products, Olympus, said it experienced a cybersecurity incident that forced it to immediately mobilize a specialized response team including forensics experts to resolve the problem.

A source said that Olympus is recovering from a ransomware attack that began in the early morning of September 8, with the attackers issuing a ransom note. Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and threat analyst at Emsisoft said the ransom note site is associated with the BlackMatter group. (Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch)

Asia-Pacific telecommunications carrier and Internet service provider MyRepublic Singapore disclosed a data breach exposing the personal information of approximately 80,000 mobile subscribers.

MyRepublic says that an unauthorized person had accessed the data of 79,388 mobile subscribers based in Singapore. The exposed data includes identity verification documents for applications for mobile services. (Lawrence Abrams / Bleeping Computer)

Researchers at ESET say that a hacker group called Thallium, believed to be linked to North Korea, attempted to steal data from South Korean experts working as members of an advisory panel for the defense ministry.

The hackers sent phishing emails disguised as government documents that can install malware on users' computers, allowing them to steal information. ESET says no visible damage has been reported from the scam. (The Korea Times)

Related: YonhapNews\

A Pentagon program that came into place just minutes before Donald Trump left the Oval Office in January, which delegated management of a huge swath of the Internet to a Florida company in January, ended just as mysteriously as it began when the Defense Department this week regained control of 175 million IP addresses.

The company assigned the program, Global Resource Systems, was only months old at the time of its award and had no public-facing records associated with it. The Pentagon maintains that the program was a pilot program, previously characterized as a cybersecurity measure designed to detect unspecified “vulnerabilities” and “prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space.” (Craig Timberg / The Washington Post)

jason wilson @jason_a_w

This is legitimately strange A secretive Pentagon program that started on Trump’s last day in office just ended. The mystery has not.The program had drawn scrutiny because of its unusual timing, starting amid a politically charged changeover of federal power, and because of its enormous scale.washingtonpost.com

As is often true of new video platforms, TikTok has been particularly aggressive in booting off educational hacking videos under its harassment and bullying policy.

TikTok has recently kicked off the educational videos prepared by Serena DiPenti, who goes by the name shenetworks, and famed security practitioner Marcus Hutchins, who goes by MalwareTech. (Joseph Cox / Motherboard)

shenetworks @notshenetworks

My videos were yeeted off of @tiktok_us but made it into vice. Check it out

TikTok Is Removing Educational Hacking VideosMultiple creators showed that TikTok is particularly aggressive at removing videos that are designed to educate viewers about hacking.vice.com

Facebook-owned WhatsApp said that it would give its two billion users the option to encrypt their chat backups to the cloud, to shut off at least one method that hackers can use to compromise its users.

“WhatsApp is the first global messaging service at this scale to offer end-to-end encrypted messaging and backups, and getting there was a really hard technical challenge that required an entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage across operating systems,” said Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a post. (Manish Singh, Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch)

Fujitsu has confirmed that data marketed by cybercriminals on the dark web marketplace Marketo is not related to any cyberattack on its systems but is related to one of its partners in Japan.

Marketo claimed to have confidential customer information, company data, budget data, reports, and other company documents, including project information from Fujitsu. Marketo now says the data comes from Japanese manufacturing giant Toray Industries. (Jonathan Greig / ZDNet)

Related: Tech Times, DataBreaches.net

Mesa County, CO, Deputy Clerk Belinda Knisley faces felony burglary and misdemeanor cybercrime charges that are separate from any charges she may face related to the Federal Bureau of Investigations' ongoing criminal investigations into election security breaches.

According to court documents and an arrest warrant, "it appeared Knisley was using [Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters’] Mesa County work station to access the secure Mesa County computer network while she was in Peters' office.” (Blair Miller / The Denver Channel)

Related: Infosecurity Magazine

A former graduate student at the University of South Wales, Hayder Aljayyash, has been sentenced to 20 months in prison for hacking into a university computer system and selling answers to exams for thousands of pounds.

After a professor raised suspicions over the uniformity of answers students gave on an exam, the university processed approximately 140 million login records that led to the IP address used by Aljayyash. (Lamiat Sabin / The Independent)

Related: Infosecurity Magazine, Exploit One

Researchers at Insikt Group, the threat research division of Recorded Future, discovered that Chinese hackers breached the internal networks of at least ten Indonesian government ministries and agencies, including computers from Indonesia’s primary intelligence service, the Badan Intelijen Negara (BIN).

Although the researchers notified Indonesian authorities about the intrusions in June and then again in July, officials did not respond to the notifications. (Catalin Cimpanu / The Record)

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced that it had hired Kiersten Todt, who has held cyber-focused roles in the executive branch, on Capitol Hill and the private sector, as its Chief of Staff.

Todt most recently served in the federal government in 2016 as the Executive Director of President Obama's independent, bipartisan Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. (Tim Starks / Cyberscoop)

Related: CISA

Information shared by Facebook with disinformation researchers about how people interacted with posts and links on the social network so that the academics could study misinformation on the site was inaccurate, undermining the researchers’ trust in Facebook.

The company apologized to the researchers in an email this week. “We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may cause and would like to offer as much support as possible.” (Davey Alba / New York Times)

Related: Alphr, BGR, The Verge, PC Mag, Slashdot, The Verge

Credit rating giant Moody’s said it would invest $250 million in security rating company Bitsight, which uses an algorithm to assess the likelihood that an organization will be breached.

Under the deal, Moody's will become the largest minority shareholder in Bitsight. (Sean Lyngaas / CNN)

Related: MarketScreener.com, Business Wire

Photo by Goh Rhy Yan on Unsplash