In August, a group calling themselves The Shadow Brokers publicly released a cache of NSA hacking tools, and promised to sell more. After a failed crowd-funding and auction attempt, the group now appears to be offering a wealth of trojans, exploits, and implants directly to potential customers. Since August, Motherboard has attempted to contact The Shadow Brokers through various different channels. On Thursday, the group replied.
Read the full interview on Motherboard
A U.S. citizen living in Moscow was arrested Wednesday after he flew to the United States to surrender to face charges he stole contact information for over 100 million customers of U.S. financial institutions, brokerage firms and financial news publishers, authorities said.
Read the full article on CBS News
Max Smeets’ take on the cost of cyber weapons is a thoughtful piece about the economics of cyber warfare, and the article is a useful point of departure on this topic. However, a few additional points not discussed by Smeets are worth considering, and they all point in the direction of higher costs that his piece might predict.
Read the full article on the true cost of cyber weapons on the Council on Foreign Relations
The Shadow Brokers—a hacker or group of hackers that stole computer exploits from the National Security Agency—has been quiet for some time. After their auction and crowd-funded approach for selling the exploits met a lukewarm reception, the group seemingly stopped posting new messages in October. But a newly uncovered website, which includes a file apparently signed with The Shadow Brokers’ cryptographic key, suggests the group is trying to sell hacking tools directly to buyers one by one, and a cache of files appears to include more information on specific exploits.
Read more on Motherboard
Visit CSO Online for information about cybersecurity events in 2017.
Targeted attacks are typically carried out against individuals to obtain intellectual property and other valuable data from target organizations. These individuals are either directly in possession of the targeted information or are able to connect to networks where the information resides. Microsoft researchers have encountered twin threat activity groups that appear to target individuals for reasons that are quite uncommon.
Read the full article on Microsoft’s Threat Research & Response blog
In what is likely the largest data breach ever, Yahoo is reporting that data associated with more than 1 billion user accounts was stolen in August 2013.The incident is separate from a breach Yahoo reported in September involving at least 500 million users that originally occurred in late 2014 and shook public trust in the company.
Full article via CSO Online
A new Vanson Bourne survey of 500 businesses in the UK, US, France and Germany revealed that nine in ten companies want to see IT security vendors offer a guarantee on their products and services, and 85 per cent claim they would change providers if they could find an alternate IT security vendor who offers a guarantee.
Read more on Help Net Security
90% of enterprise IT professionals are concerned that employee reuse of personal credentials for work purposes could compromise security. However, with 68% saying they would be comfortable allowing employees to use their social media credentials on company resources, Gemalto’s research suggests that personal applications (such as email) are the biggest worry to organisations.
Cyber Security Intel 