Welcome to the CyberCure Bi-Weekly podcast transcript.
This article will give you a brief summary of the latest news related to cyber intelligence and proactive cyber security, all in only a few minutes.
In this article we will focus on the latest cyber events for non-technical people; anyone can listen and understand.
For several years now the international relations between Russia and Australia are not on the good side.
Australia’s ties with Russia soured after the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 back in 2014, the joint task force that investigated the crash, reached a conclusion that the airplane brought down by a Russian surface-to-air missile known as BUK , the missile launcher arrived to Ukraine at the same day from Russia and went back after the shooting.
Moscow has denied involvement.
We also have al ready covered the massive cyber incident Australia government that happened during Feb 2019 in previous podcasts.
Most security experts pointed fingers towards China/Iran as the (default) immediate suspect, but some also pointed Russia as a suspect that can perform such massive cyber attack and that had a motive.
During the end of June 2019 , Russian internet giant Yandex reportedly hacked by Western intelligence agency.
Hackers working for the US or one of its closest allies broke into Russian search giant Yandex to plant malware to spy on user accounts, Reuters reported.
The specific malware that was used during the attack is known to be used by the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance composed of US, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
The attack occurred between October and November of 2018 and that the hackers had access to Yandex’s research and development unit for several weeks.
Is this attack was retaliation or related to the MH17 incident ?
One might wonder if this is the reason why recently there are more and more voices from political leaders in Australia discussing the need to develop and extend the country’s offensive cyber capabilities.
On July 13, hackers targeted a Moscow information technology company, “Sitek,” or SyTech, and defaced the company’s homepage with a “Yoba Face,” a fixture of Russian internet slang that denotes trolling.
The hackers relayed data to journalists that detailed several secret Russian internet projects, including Federal Security Service attempts to de-anonymize Tor browsing,
scrape social media sites, and split the Russian internet off from the rest of the world.
BBC Russia reports that SyTech’s projects were contracted under the signals intelligence division of the FSB, the same group that was accused of emailing spyware to Ukrainian intelligence officials in 2015.
The hackers left messages to the FSB online at twitter taunting them and exposing project names and project managers names.
BBC Russia reports this is possibly “the largest data leak in the history of the work of Russian special services.”
The hackers stole 7.5 Terabytes of data that they shared with the world.
The 0v1ru$ group which took credit for this hack is not previously known and havent released any more details since. Was it intentional hack & leak of other government or intelligence agency?
The FSB declined to provide response to the press.
Stay safe and see you next time. Don’t forget to visit www.cybercure.ai for the latest podcasts and cyber intelligence.