What Does It Take To Be a Cybersecurity Researcher?
Behind the strategies and solutions needed to counter today s cyber threats are dedicated cybersecurity researchers. They spend their lives dissecting code and analyzing incident reports to discover how to stop the bad guys.
But what drives these specialists? To understand the motivations for why these cybersecurity pros do what they do, we decided to talk with cybersecurity analysts from around the world.
To get viewpoints from across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, we recently spoke with a team of researchers from Acronis global network of Cyber Protection Operations Centers (CPOCs):
Candid Wüest, VP of Cyber Protection Research who is based in Switzerland;
Hackers From China Target Vietnamese Military and Government
A hacking group related to a Chinese-speaking threat actor has been linked to an advanced cyberespionage campaign targeting government and military organizations in Vietnam.
The attacks have been attributed with low confidence to the advanced persistent threat (APT) called Cycldek (or Goblin Panda, Hellsing, APT 27, and Conimes), which is known for using spear-phishing techniques to compromise diplomatic targets in Southeast Asia, India, and the U.S. at least since 2013.
According to researchers from Kaspersky, the offensive, which was observed between June 2020 and January 2021, leverages a method called DLL side-loading to execute shellcode that decrypts a final payload dubbed FoundCore.
Hackers Set Up a Fake Cybersecurity Firm to Target Security Experts
A North Korean government-backed campaign targeting cybersecurity researchers with malware has re-emerged with new tactics in their arsenal as part of a fresh social engineering attack.
In an update shared on Wednesday, Google s Threat Analysis Group said the attackers behind the operation set up a fake security company called SecuriElite and a slew of social media accounts across Twitter and LinkedIn in an attempt to trick unsuspecting researchers into visiting the company s booby-trapped website where a browser exploit was waiting to be triggered. The new website claims the company is an offensive security company located in Turkey that offers pentests, software security assessments and exploits, TAG s Adam Weidemann said. The website is said to have gone live on March 17.
DeepDotWeb Admin Pleads Guilty to Money Laundering Charges
DeepDotWeb (DDW), a news website that served as a gateway to numerous dark web marketplaces.
According to the unsealed court documents,
Tal Prihar, 37, an Israeli citizen residing in Brazil, operated DDW alongside
Michael Phan, 34, of Israel, starting October 2013, in return for which they received kickbacks from the operators of the marketplaces in the form of virtual currency amounting to 8,155 bitcoins (worth $8.4 million at the time of the transactions).
In an attempt to conceal the illicit payments, Prihar is said to have transferred the money to other bitcoin accounts and to bank accounts under his control in the name of shell companies.