Software supply chain attacks have been trending sharply upward since 2019 but doubled from 2022 to 2023 alone, the largest increase of the roughly four-year period. The high inactivity rate of open source projects is a major contributing factor.
HTTP/2 protocol zero-day vulnerability results in DDoS attacks with 200 million to 398 million requests per second, far above the previous record of 71 million using older techniques. Some attacks came from botnets of just about 20,000 devices.
An assortment of hacktivists are jumping into the Israel-Hamas conflict, and thus far most of the early cyber attacks have been limited denial of service (DDoS) attempts on public websites.
Report on crypto laundering finds the total amount being washed via cross-chain transactions has made another massive jump of nearly $3 billion over the last year, now at $7 billion. North Korea’s Lazarus hacking group is the biggest single driver with nearly a billion dollars of movement of stolen crypto to its name during this time.
An August action saw 52 servers seized along with a hoard of over $8 million in cryptocurrency. This was enough for the FBI to confidently declare that the Qakbot malware botnet was “permanently disabled,” but the operators are still spreading ransomware.
MGM expects a little over $100 million in total cost from the ransomware attack, but that most or all of that will be covered. The company also said that most of that financial damage came from loss of hotel bookings during the extended recovery period.
EU’s Cyber Resilience Act’s vulnerability disclosure terms would require that the government be notified within 24 hours of discovery even if the vulnerability has not yet been patched or had solid mitigation measures developed for it.
NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware recently re-emerged with a new zero-click attack chain called BLASTPASS, and new CVE filings from Google indicate that the libwebp library used to display WEBP images has a security vulnerability that is a key part of the process.
State-backed Chinese hackers targeting older Cisco routers at less well-defended international branches of US and Japanese corporations, By first downgrading to an older firmware, they can then install their own custom firmware with a stealthy backdoor for long-term exfiltration of information.
A relatively new Russian outfit called “Operation Zero” has made major waves by offering up to $20 million for successful zero-day exploits, a price that would have previously been thought crazy.