The individuals operating under the DragonForce banner and attacking UK high street retailers are using social engineering for entry. I think it’s in the public interest to break down what is happening.

The attacks on Marks and Spencer, Co-op and Harrods are linked. DragonForce’s lovely PR team claim more are to come.

Defenders should urgently make sure they have read the CISA briefs on Scattered Spider and LAPSUS$ as it’s a repeat of the 2022–2023 activity which saw breaches at Nvidia, Samsung, Rockstar and Microsoft amongst many others. More info below.

I am not saying it is Scatter Spider; Scattered Spider has become a dumping ground for e-crime groups anyway. The point is they — the threat actor — are entering using the front door, via the helpdesk to get MFA access — those are very good guides from defenders about what to do, links below.

Source: Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
DragonForce is a white label cartel operation housing anybody who wants to do e-crime. Some of them are pretty good at e-crime.

While organisations are away at RSA thinking about quantum AI cyber mega threats — the harsh reality is most organisations do not have the foundations in place to do be worrying about those kind of things. Generative AI is porn for execs and growth investment — threat actors are very aware that now is the time to launch attacks, not with GenAI, but foundational issues. Because nobody is paying attention.

Once they get access, they are living off the land — using Teams, Office search to find documentation, the works. Forget APTs, now you have the real threat: Advanced Persistent Teenagers, who have realised the way to evade most large cyber programmes is to cosplay as employees. Last time this happened, the MET Police ended up arresting a few under-18 UK nationals causing incidents to largely drop off.

Back in 2022, Fortinet warned that somebody had a zero day vulnerability and was using it to exploit Fortigate firewalls https://www.fortinet.com/blog/psirt-blogs/update-regarding-cve-2022-40684

Today, Belsen Group publicly released Fortigate firewall configs from just over 15k unique devices:

Did you know there’s widespread exploitation of FortiNet products going on using a zero day, and that there’s no CVE? Now you do.

Back in May, I started tracking Handala, a hacktivist branded group expressing pro-Palestine views:

Cloud AI Data platform Snowflake are having a bad month. Due to teenager threat actors and cybersecurity of its own customers… and its own cybersecurity, too, in terms of optics.

There are several large data breaches playing out in the media currently. For example, Ticketmaster owner Live Nation filed an 8-K with the SEC for potentially the largest data breach ever, claimed to be 560 million customers.

I wrote a piece recently about Copilot+ Recall, a new Microsoft Windows 11 feature which — in the words of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella- takes “screenshots” of your PC constantly, and makes it into an…

I monitor (in an amateur, clueless way) ransomware groups in my spare time, to see what intelligence can be gained from looking at victim orgs and what went wrong.

Basically, I’m a giant big dork with too much free time.

I’ve discovered two organisations with ransomware incidents, where the entry point appears to have been Exchange Server 2013 with Outlook Web Access enabled, where all available security updates were applied.

Credit union technology firm Trellance own Ongoing Operations LLC, and provide a platform called Fedcomp — used by double digit number of other credit unions across the United States. This Fedcomp…

Recently, I’ve been tracking LockBit ransomware group as they’ve been breaching large enterprises:
I thought it would be good to break down what is happening and how they’re doing it, since LockBit are breaching some of the world’s largest organisations — many of whom have incredibly large security budgets.
Through data allowing the tracking of ransomware operators, it has been possible to track individual targets. Recently, it has become clear they have been targeting a vulnerability in Citrix Netscaler, called CitrixBleed. Prior reading:

You have have read about the hack of the Electoral Commission recently. In this piece we take a look at what happened, show they were running Microsoft Exchange Server with Outlook Web App (OWA) facing the internet, and the unpatched vulnerability that presented.

Thousands of small to medium size businesses are suffering as Rackspace have suffered a security incident on their Hosted Exchange service.

Yesterday, 2nd December 2022, Rackspace announced an outage to their Hosted Exchange Server:

Yesterday, cybersecurity vendor GTSC Cyber Security dropped a blog saying they had detected exploitation of a new Microsoft Exchange zero…

Two days ago, Nao_sec identified an odd looking Word document in the wild, uploaded from an IP address in Belarus...