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SonicWall Staff

Cybersecurity News & Trends

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The Mid-Year Update to the 2021 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report continues to circulate through global news, and SonicWall rises to the status of an “admired brand.” In industry news, uncomfortable questions about U.S. cyber-intelligence methods, Autodesk’s admission, FIN7 hackers on the move, how Australia got hammered by hackers, and a Colorado man sues U.K. parents of hackers for a 3-year-old cryptocurrency hack.

SonicWall in the News

The Hybrid Workplace: The Next Frontier of Cyber Security — CPO Magazine

  • This story covers the aftermath of a REvil Kaseya attack. Thousands of business leaders are calculating their losses and cost of recovery, now dubbed the “worst ransomware attack on record.” The story cites the Mid-Year Update to the 2021 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report as a key source for the sharp rise of attacks via Microsoft Office documents that rose by 176% in 2020.

Ransomware threats explode in first-half 2021 — Frontier Enterprise

The Tech Industry Is Marching Ahead With These Admired Brands — Mybrandbook.com

  • A report that assesses the importance of “admired” brands in tech recounts SonicWall’s origins as a private company headquartered in Silicon Valley to a significant brand in cybersecurity with more than 1 million active security solutions trusted by more than 500,000 organizations in more than 215 countries.

Industry News

Hacker kids’ parents sued over $780k of stolen cryptocurrency — P.C. Gamer

  • In January of 2018, Colorado resident Andrew Schober was relieved of 16.4 bitcoin, worth around $780,000 in today’s market, by unknown hackers. Schober hired private investigators to track down the hack to two UK-based computer science students then minors. He’s now suing the parents of the two he believes hacked his account and stole his cash.

SolarWinds hackers targeted Autodesk in latest confirmed fallout from cyber-espionage campaign — CyberScoop

  • The list of victims keeps growing of the hackers (believed to be Russian) who breached a U.S. federal contractor. The hackers, it is believed, collected intelligence from all over the federal government. Autodesk filed an SEC disclosure to its investors that the hackers compromised one of its servers.

Juniper Breach Mystery Starts to Clear With New Details on Hackers and U.S. Role — Bloomberg

  • Days before Christmas in 2015, Juniper Networks Inc. alerted users that it had been breached. Five years later, the hackers have not been publicly identified, and no victims from the hack have surfaced. This brings the uncomfortable question about the methods U.S. intelligence agencies use to monitor hackers.

FIN7 Hackers Using Windows 11 Themed Documents to Drop Javascript Backdoor — The Hacker News

  • Spear-phishing campaigns leveraging weaponized Windows 11 Alpha-themed Word documents with Visual Basic macros. The macros inject malicious payloads, including a JavaScript implant that attacks a U.S.-based point-of-sale (PoS) service provider.

How Hackers Hammered Australia After China Ties Turned Sour — Bloomberg

  • A few days after Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for an independent international probe into the origins of the coronavirus, Chinese bots swarmed onto Australian government networks. It was April 2020. Bloomberg brings the incident to light in this week’s article.  

Regulators Tighten Scrutiny of Data Breach Disclosures — The Wall Street Journal

  • Lawyers warn that companies must pay closer attention to what they say after hackers strike, as regulators crack down on inaccurate disclosures and Congress debates mandatory reporting of cybersecurity breaches.

Biden administration establishes program to recruit tech professionals to serve in government — The Hill

  • The Biden administration announced it was establishing a program to recruit and train people to serve in digital positions within the federal government and address the COVID-19 pandemic and cybersecurity concerns.

Bangkok Airways hit by LockBit ransomware attack, loses lots data after refusing to pay — The Register

  • Bangkok Airways has revealed it was the victim of a cyberattack from ransomware group LockBit on August 23, resulting in the publishing of stolen data.

LockFile Ransomware Uses Never-Before Seen Encryption to Avoid Detection — Threat Post 

  • Researchers from Sophos discovered the emerging threat in July, which exploits the ProxyShell vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange servers to attack systems.

Initial Access Broker use, stolen account sales spike in cloud service cyberattacks — ZDNet

  • On Tuesday, Lacework published its 2021 Cloud Threat Report vol.2, outlining how today’s cybercriminals are attempting to cut out some of the legwork involved in campaigns against cloud service providers.

Cyberattackers are now quietly selling off their victim’s internet bandwidth — ZDNet

  • Another intrusion with a twist: attackers use “proxyware” to target their victim’s internet connection and generate illicit revenue.

Cybercriminal sells tool to hide malware in AMD, NVIDIA GPUs — Bleeping Computer

  • Cybercriminals are making strides towards malware attacks that execute code from the graphics processing unit (GPU) of a compromised system.

Boston Public Library discloses cyberattack, system-wide technical outage — Bleeping Computer

  • The Boston Public Library (BPL) has disclosed today that its network was hit by a cyberattack on Wednesday, leading to a system-wide technical outage. 

U.S. Justice Department Introduces Cyber Fellowship Program — Security Week

  • The program will train selected attorneys on emerging national security and criminal cyber threats and how to fight them. The trainees will be rotating department components focused on cyber defense, such as the Criminal Division, the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, and the National Security Division. 

Researchers, cybersecurity agency urge action by Microsoft cloud database users — Reuters

  • On Saturday, researchers who discovered a massive flaw in the central databases stored in Microsoft Corp’s Azure cloud platform urged all users to change their digital access keys, not just the 3,300 the company notified this week.

Bangkok Airways apologizes for passport info breach as LockBit ransomware group threatens data leak — ZDNet

  • The company said that it discovered a “cybersecurity attack which resulted in unauthorized and unlawful access to its information system” on August 23.

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SonicWall Staff