What could be more controversial than a famous surveillance camera manufacturer with an uneasy relationship with US police? When the company was said to have been breached by ransomware hackers, the Amazon-owned camera maker stole the data and responded by denying the Ring breach.
But we will get there.
Five years ago, Dutch police arrested members of Russia's GRU military intelligence for trying to hack into the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. The group parked a rental car outside the company building and hid a Wi-Fi antenna in the trunk. Among the GRU team was Evgenii Serebriakov, who was caught with additional Wi-Fi hacking equipment in his backpack.
Since then, surprisingly, Serebriakov has only achieved status. Western intelligence sources told WIRED this week that Serebrikov is now the new leader of one of the world's most aggressive hacking units. In the spring of 2022, Serebrikov took charge of Sandworm, responsible for some of the worst cyberattacks in history. Experts say his rise to a leadership position shows how small the nation-state's pool of qualified hackers is, and Serebrykov proves that power benefits Russia.
No place on the Internet is threat-free, including LinkedIn. This week, we looked at how spies, fraudsters and hackers from Iran, North Korea, Russia and China use professional networks to find and approach intelligence targets. Additionally, LinkedIn is littered with thousands of suspicious accounts; Hundreds were deleted from WIRED's profiles after they were reported.
The Western crackdown on TikTok continues: This week the UK joined the US, Belgium, Canada and the European Union in banning the use of the social networking app on government devices. But in the US, Senator Mark Warner is trying to push through legislation disguised as the Bipartisan Restrictions Act, which would allow officials to ban apps and services from six "hostile" countries: China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. We sat down with Warner and asked him about the plan.
A cable analysis of "cybercrime" cases in the United States shows how vague and broad the term can be. Without a clear and universal definition of cybercrime, human rights and civil liberties problems can spread throughout the world. Speaking of criminals, scammers are getting better at using fake voices to trick people. And ransomware gangs are sinking to a sad new low. As more companies and organizations refuse to pay the ransom, criminal gangs are increasingly using extortion as leverage, now releasing stolen photos of cancer patients and confidential student documents.
But wait, there's more. Every week, we round up security news that we don't dig ourselves. Click on the title to read the full story and stay safe there.
ALPHV, a thriving hacker group that extorts ransomware from companies and leaks stolen data, said earlier this week that it hacked security camera manufacturer Ring and threatened to dump the company's data if it didn't pay. "There is always a chance that your data could be leaked…" the hackers wrote in a message to Ring on its leak site. Ring has so far responded in the negative, telling Vice's Motherboard, "We currently have no indication of a ransomware incident," but saying it is aware of an experienced third-party vendor. . This seller, Ring said, does not have access to any customer records.
Meanwhile, ALPHV, which previously used its BlackCat ransomware to target companies including Bandai Namco, Swissport and hospital company Lehigh Valley Health Network, confirmed it hacked Ring itself, not a third-party vendor. A member of the VX-Underground malware research team shared screenshots of an interview with an ALPHV representative with WIRED, who said they were still "discussing" the ring.
In the midst of the current ransomware epidemic, it's no surprise that Ring isn't the only one facing extortion problems. The same goes for Maximum Industries, the rocket parts supplier to Elon Musk's SpaceX. The hackers, a notorious ransomware group known as Lockbit, taunted Musk on their website, threatening to sell the stolen data to the highest bidder if the highest bidder was not paid by March 20. "I'd say we'd be lucky if the Space-X contractors were more vocal. But I think this material will soon find its buyer," the hackers wrote. "Elon Musk will help you sell your designs to other manufacturers."
Google's Project Zero, a security research group dedicated to finding unknown vulnerabilities in widely used technology products, warned Thursday that it had found serious hackable flaws in Samsung chips used in dozens of Android devices. In total, the researchers found 18 separate vulnerabilities in Samsung's Exynos modems, but said four of them are particularly critical and would allow a hacker to "remotely compromise a phone at the baseband level without user interaction." The attacker knows the victim's phone number. Project Zero rarely publishes information about unpatched vulnerabilities. But he says he gave Samsung 90 days to fix the bugs and still hasn't. Some public shaming might have made Samsung move faster to protect Google users from malicious attacks.
Since 2017, the cryptocurrency "mixer" service ChipMixer has quietly become a crypto-money laundering powerhouse, accepting users' coins, mixing them with others, and then sending them back through cryptocurrency chains to hide the money trail. Block In the process, the Justice Department says, $3 billion in revenue was laundered, including ransomware payments, loot stolen from North Korean hackers, and even the sale of child sexual exploitation material. Today, in a multi-agency European law enforcement operation coordinated by Europol, the FBI and DHS, ChipMixer was taken offline and its infrastructure hijacked. The site's alleged creator, 49-year-old Vietnamese Minh Cuc Nguyen, remains at large, only charged in absentia with money laundering.
But the strangest outcome of the case may have more to do with the collapse of the now famous FTX cryptocurrency exchange: a part of the FTX funds stolen during the bankruptcy proceedings in November went to ChipMixer. By exploiting the servers of these hashing services, FTX theft can thwart efforts to avoid tracking and help solve one of the main mysteries of this high-profile theft.
In the cryptocurrency world alone, where more than half a billion dollars are now stolen each year, is the theft of $200 million worth the low point of the summary? Earlier this week, distributed trading protocol Euler Finance lost nearly $200 million in cryptocurrencies after hackers discovered a vulnerability in its code. Initially, Euler, the company behind the protocol, had to pay the hackers $20 million, if the rest of the funds were returned. But after the offer was ignored (in fact, the hackers sent funds to the Tornado Cash Mixing service in an attempt to cover their tracks), the company announced a million dollar reward for the hackers' heads.
