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Instances of phishing attacks leveraging the Microsoft brand increased 266 percent in Q1 compared to the year prior.
The bloom is back on phishing attacks with criminals doubling down on fake messages abusing popular brands compared to the year prior. Microsoft, Facebook and French bank Crédit Agricole are the top abused brands in attacks, according to study on phishing released Tuesday.
According to the report by researchers at Vade, phishing attacks abusing the Microsoft brand increased 266 percent in the first quarter of 2022, compared to the year prior. Fake Facebook messages are up 177 percent in the second quarter of 2022 within the same timeframe.
The study by Vade analyzed unique instances of phishing URLs used by criminals carrying out phishing attacks and not the number of phishing emails associated with the URLs. The report tallied the 25 most commonly targeted companies, along with the most abused industries and days of the week for phishing emails.
Phishing By the Numbers
Other top abused brands in phishing attacks include Credit Agricole, WhatsApp, and French telecommunications company Orange. Popular brands also included PayPal, Google and Apple (see chart).
Through the first half of 2022, 34 percent of all unique phishing attacks tracked by the researchers impersonated financial services brands. The next most popular industry for criminals to abuse is cloud and the firms Microsoft, Google and Adobe. Social media was also a popular target with Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram leading the list of brands leveraged in attacks.
The report revealed the most popular days for sending phishing emails is between Monday and Wednesday. Less than 20 percent of malicious emails are sent on the weekend.
“Phishing attacks are more sophisticated than ever,” wrote Adrien Gendre, chief tech and product officer at Vade in an email to Threatpost.
“Hackers have an arsenal of tools at their disposal to manipulate end users and evade email security, including phishing kits that can identify when they are being scanned by a vendor and trigger benign webpages to avoid detection. End users need to be continually trained to identify the latest phishing techniques,” he wrote.
Over 5.4 million Twitter users have reportedly been targeted in a major breach of personal data following revelations earlier this year that the site had a serious security flaw.
The security flaw came to light in January, when a user on HackerOne named “zhirinovskiy” pointed out that Twitter was vulnerable to hackers seeking to use information for malicious purposes.
At the time, Zhirinovskiy detailed exactly how to exploit the bug and described it as a “serious threat” even in the hands of those with only a “basic knowledge” of scripting and coding.
Twitter acknowledged the problem five days later and appeared to have fixed the problem a week after that, when it rewarded Zhirinovskiy with a $5,040 bounty for bringing the vulnerability to its attention.
A seller with the username ‘devil’ claims that “Celebrities, to Companies, randoms, OGs, etc” are included in the data set and is asking for at least $30,000, RestorePrivacy says.
A spokesperson from Twitter told Fortune: “We received a report of this incident several months ago through our bug bounty program, immediately investigated thoroughly and fixed the vulnerability.”
The spokesperson added that Twitter was “reviewing the latest data to verify the authenticity of the claims and ensure the security of the accounts in question.”
Also known as the Atlantis Cyber-Army, the emerging organization has an enigmatic leader and a core set of admins that offer a range of services, including exclusive data leaks, DDoS and RDP.
A for-hire cybercriminal group is feeling the talent-drought in tech just like the rest of the sector and has resorted to recruiting so-called “cyber-mercenaries” to carry out specific illicit hacks that are part of larger criminal campaigns.
Dubbed Atlas Intelligence Group (A.I.G.), the cybergang has been spotted by security researchers recruiting independent black-hat hackers to execute specific aspects of its own campaigns. A.I.G., also known as Atlantis Cyber-Army, functions as a cyber-threats-as-a-service criminal enterprise. The threat group markets services that include data leaks, distributed denial of service (DDoS), remote desktop protocol (RDP) hijacking and additional network penetration services, according to a Thursday report by threat intelligence firm Cyberint.
“[A.I.G.] has introduced us to out-of-the-box thinking,” Cyberint’s Shmuel Gihon wrote in the report.
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A.I.G., according to researchers, is unique in its outsourcing approach to committing cybercrimes. Organized threat groups tend to recruit individuals with certain capabilities that they can reuse and incent them with profit sharing. For example, Ransomware-as-a-Service organized crime campaigns can involve multiple threat actors – each getting a cut of any extorted lucre or digital assets stolen. What makes A.I.G. different is it outsources specific aspects of an attack to “mercenaries” who have no further involvement in an attack.
The report’s author, Gihon, said only A.I.G. administrators and the group’s leader—dubbed Mr. Eagle—know fully what the campaign will be and outsource isolated tasks to hired guns based on their skillsets.
Unique Business Model
This uncommon business model also allows the group, which has been operating since the beginning of May, to offer a range of cybercriminal services instead of a single core competency, he said.
“While many groups are focusing on one, maybe two, services that they offer, Atlas seems to grow rapidly and expand its operations in an efficient way which allows them to offer many services,” Gihon wrote.
A.I.G. tends to target government and state assets in countries all over the world, including the United States, Pakistan, Israel, Colombia and United Arab Emirates, researchers found.
Mr. Eagle not only leads the campaigns but also doubles as a chief marketing officer of sorts, putting a significant effort into advertising A.I.G.’s various cybercriminal services, he said.
A poor, permanent hire can be a very expensive error, whereas a mis-hire on a virtual CISO can be rapidly corrected.
The cybersecurity challenges that companies are facing today are vast, multidimensional, and rapidly changing. Exacerbating the issue is the relentless evolution of threat actors and their ability to outmaneuver security controls effortlessly.
As technology races forward, companies without a full-time CISO are struggling to keep pace. For many, finding, attracting, retaining, and affording the level of skills and experience needed is out of reach or simply unrealistic. Enter the virtual CISO (vCISO). These on-demand experts provide security insights to companies on an ongoing basis and help ensure that security teams have the resources they need to be successful.
How a vCISO Works Typically, an engagement with a vCISO is long lasting, but in a fractional delivery model. This is very different from a project-oriented approach that requires a massive investment and results in a stack of deliverables for the internal team to implement and maintain. A vCISO not only helps to form the approach, define the action plan, and set the road map but, importantly, stays engaged throughout the implementation and well into the ongoing management phases.
The best vCISO engagements are long-term contracts, such as 12 to 24 months. Typically, there’s an upfront effort where the vCISO is more engaged in the first few months to establish an understanding, develop a road map, and create a rhythm with the team. Then, their support drops into a regular pace which can range from two to three days per week or five to ten days per month.
What to Expect From a vCISO When bringing a vCISO on board, it’s important that person has three key attributes: broad and extensive experience in addressing cybersecurity challenges across many industries; business acumen and the ability to rapidly absorb complex business models and strategies; and knowledge of technology solutions and dynamics that can be explored to meet specific organizational needs.
The first thing a vCISO will focus on is prioritization, beginning with understanding a company’s risks. They will then organize actions that provide the greatest positive influence on mitigating these risks while ensuring sustainability in the program. The goal is to establish a security approach that addresses the greatest risks to the business in a way that has staying power and can provide inherent value to additional downstream controls.
Having extensive experience in the technical space, a vCISO can take into consideration the full spectrum of options — those existing within the business environment, established products and services in the marketplace, and new solutions entering the market. Just within that context, a vCISO can collaborate with the technical team to take advantage of existing solutions and identify enhancements that can further capabilities in a cost-efficient manner.
The Value of a vCISO One of the most common findings is that companies often have a large portfolio of cybersecurity technology, but very little is fully deployed. Additionally, most tech teams are not leveraging all of the capabilities, much less integrating with other systems to get greater value. Virtual CISOs help companies save money by exploiting existing technical investments that dramatically improve security. And, since the improvement is focused on existing tools, the transition for the IT and security staff is virtually eliminated due to established familiarity with the environment.
Another essential value point of a vCISO is access to an informed and well-balanced view on risk and compliance. While cybersecurity is dominated by technical moving parts, the reality is the board, executive leadership, and management team needs to incorporate cyber-risks and related liabilities into the overall scope of risk across the business at an executive level. In this sense, leadership has a vast array of competing challenges, demands, and risks and some can be even more impactful than cybersecurity.
How to Convince the Executive Team A CEO is under a constant barrage of challenges, problems, risks, and opportunities. Cybersecurity needs to be part of that formula. If one of the core values of having a vCISO is getting meaningful cyber-risk insights, then trust and confidence in that person is paramount and needs to be established from the beginning.
Another challenge is the team dynamic — at the heart of being a CEO is their success as a leader. Introducing what is essentially a consultant can be an adjustment for the team. It’s important that the vCISO hire fits the culture and can easily integrate with everyone on the team including the CIO, CTO, CPO, CRO, etc.
The conversation with the CFO will understandably have a heavy financial tone. For companies debating between a full-time CISO or a vCISO, it’s clear a poor permanent hire can be a very expensive error, whereas a mis-hire on a vCISO can be rapidly corrected.
As organizations continue to come to grips with the byproducts of digitization and new security challenges that often seem insurmountable, a vCISO can be an enormous value. Beyond offering an efficient and cost-effective model, they bring many advantages to businesses with fewer risks than a dedicated resource.
This document provides guidance on how operators should assess the security of vendor’s security processes and vendor equipment and is referenced in the Telecom Security Act Code of Practice.
The purpose of the guidance is to allow operators to objectively assess the cyber risk due to use of the vendor’s equipment. This is performed by gathering objective, repeatable evidence on the security of the vendor’s processes and network equipment.
Often we see stories about cyber attacks that breached an organisations’ security parameters, and advice on how we can protect against future threats. However, what is often missed, is just how these threat actors managed to breach a system, and as such, the fact that the Domain Name System (DNS) probably played a very large role in the attacker’s entry point.
In this Help Net Security video, Chris Buijs, Chief Evangelist at EfficientIP, talks about the importance of making the DNS as part of an organisation’s security strategy.
Expert discovered a remote memory-corruption vulnerability affecting the latest version of the OpenSSL library.
Security expert Guido Vranken discovered a remote memory-corruption vulnerability in the recently released OpenSSL version 3.0.4. The library was released on June 21, 2022, and affects x64 systems with the AVX-512 instruction set.
“OpenSSL version 3.0.4, released on June 21th 2022, is susceptible to remote memory corruption which can be triggered trivially by an attacker. BoringSSL, LibreSSL and the OpenSSL 1.1.1 branch are not affected. Furthermore, only x64 systems with AVX512 support are affected. The bug is fixed in the repository but a new release is still pending.” reads the post published by Vranken.
The issue can be easily exploited by threat actors and it will be addressed with the next release.
Google researcher David Benjamin that has analyzed the vulnerability argues that the bug does not constitute a security risk. Benjamin also found an apparent bug in the paper by Shay Gueron upon which the RSAZ code is based.
Cybersecurity is required to be a dynamic industry because cybercriminals don’t take days off. Cybersecurity professionals must be innovative, creative, and attentive to keep gaining the upper hand on cybercriminals. Unfortunately, there are millions of unfilled cybersecurity job openings around the globe.
The gender divide
The problem of not enough cybersecurity professionals is exacerbated by a lack of diversity in the sector. There is a disproportionately low ratio of women to men within the entire technology industry. In the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) industries, women make up only 24% of the workforce, and while this has increased from just 11% in 2017, there is clearly still a sizeable disparity.
The cybersecurity industry is performing only marginally better than STEM, with women making up roughly 24% of cybersecurity jobs globally, according to (ISC)².
There is also a parallel trend here: women have superior qualifications in cybersecurity than their male counterparts. Over half of women – 52% – have postgraduate degrees, compared to just 44% of men. More importantly, 28% of women have cybersecurity-related qualifications, while only 20% of men do. This raises one important point, which is that women feel that they must be more qualified than men to compete for and hold the same cybersecurity roles. The industry is, therefore, losing a significant pool of talent because of this perception. Untapped talent means less innovation and dynamism in the products and services businesses offer.
Unfortunately, the challenges for women do not appear to stop once they enter the cybersecurity workforce. Pay disparity continues to blight the industry. Women reported being on smaller salaries at a higher proportion than men. 17% of women reported earning between $50,000 and $99,000 compared to 29% of men. However, there are signs that this disparity in pay is closing. For those in cybersecurity who earned over $100,000, the difference in percentage between men and women was much closer. This is encouraging and shows that once women are in the industry, they can enjoy as much success as men.
Nevertheless, reaching these higher levels of the cybersecurity industry is far from straightforward for women at present. It is an unavoidable fact that women still struggle to progress as easily compared to male counterparts. A key reason for this is cultural: women are disinclined to shout about their achievements, as such they regularly go unnoticed when promotions and other opportunities come round.
The cybersecurity industry is starting to embrace diversity in the workforce, but there is a long way to go before women are as valued in cybersecurity as men. With the current skills deficit hampering the growth of cybersecurity providers, this is a perfect opportunity for the industry and individual providers to break the bias and turn to women to speed up innovation and improve defense against cybercriminals.
Welcome to our May 2022 review of data breaches and cyber attacks. We identified 77 security incidents during the month, resulting in 49,782,129 compromised records.
You can find the full list below, with incidents affecting UK organisations listed in bold.
Many security engineers are already one foot out the door. Why?
The position of securityengineer has become a pivotal role for modern security teams. Practitioners are responsible for critical monitoring of networks and systems to identify threats or intrusions that could cause immense harm to an organization.
They must analyze troves of security-related data, detect immediate threats as early as possible on the cyber kill chain. From their vantage point, they are often best positioned to evaluate security monitoring solutions and recommend security operations improvement to management.
In this video for Help Net Security, Jack Naglieri, CEO of Panther Labs, discusses a recent report which found that 80% of security engineers are experiencing burnout.
Security researchers at the NCC Group have developed a tool to carry out a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) relay attack that bypasses all existing protections to authenticate on target devices.
BLE technology is used in a wide spectrum of products, from electronics like laptops, mobile phones, smart locks, and building access control systems to cars like Tesla Model 3 and Model Y.
Pushing out fixes for this security problem is complicated, and even if the response is immediate and coordinated, it would still take a long time for the updates to trickle to impacted products.
How the attack works
In this type of relay attacks, an adversary intercepts and can manipulate the communication between two parties, such as the key fob that unlocks and operates the car and the vehicle itself.
This places the attacker in the middle of the two ends of the communication, allowing them to relay the signal as if they were standing right next to the car.
Products that rely on BLE for proximity-based authentication protect against known relay attack methods by introducing checks based on precise amounts of latency and also link-layer encryption.
NCC Group has developed a tool that operates at the link layer and with a latency of 8ms that is within the accepted 30ms range of the GATT (Generic ATTribute Profile) response.
“Since this relay attack operates at the link layer, it can forward encrypted link layer PDUs. It is also capable of detecting encrypted changes to connection parameters (such as connection interval, WinOffset, PHY mode, and channel map) and continuing to relay connections through parameter changes. Thus, neither link layer encryption nor encrypted connection parameter changes are defences against this type of relay attack.” – NCC Group
According to Sultan Qasim Khan, a senior security consultant at NCC Group, it takes about ten seconds to run the attack and it can be repeated endlessly.
Both the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y use a BLE-based entry system, so NCC’s attack could be used to unlock and start the cars.
While technical details behind this new BLE relay attack have not been published, the researchers say that they tested the method on a Tesla Model 3 from 2020 using an iPhone 13 mini running version 4.6.1-891 of the Tesla app.
“NCC Group was able to use this newly developed relay attack tool to unlock and operate the vehicle while the iPhone was outside the BLE range of the vehicle” – NCC Group
During the experiment, they were able to deliver to the car the communication from the iPhone via two relay devices, one placed seven meters away from the phone, the other sitting three meters from the car. The distance between the phone and the car was 25 meters.
The experiment was also replicated successfully on a Tesla Model Y from 2021, since it uses similar technologies. Below is a demonstration of the attack:
These findings were reported to Tesla on April 21st. A week later, the company responded by saying “that relay attacks are a known limitation of the passive entry system.”
The researchers also notified Spectrum Brands, the parent company behind Kwikset (makers of the Kevo line of smart locks).
What can be done
NCC Group’s research on this new proximity attack is available in three separate advisories, for BLE in general, one for Tesla cars, and another for Kwikset/Weiser smart locks, each illustrating the issue on the tested devices and how it affects a larger set of products from other vendors.
The Bluetooth Core Specification warns device makers about relay attacks and notes that proximity-based authentication shouldn’t be used for valuable assets.
This leaves users with few possibilities, one being to disable it, if possible, and switch to an alternative authentication method that requires user interaction.
Another solution would be for makers to adopt a distance bounding solution such as UWB (ultra-wideband) radio technology instead of Bluetooth.
Tesla owners are encouraged to use the ‘PIN to Drive’ feature, so even if their car is unlocked, at least the attacker won’t be able to drive away with it.
Additionally, disabling the passive entry functionality in the mobile app when the phone is stationary would make the relay attack impossible to carry out.
If none of the above is possible on your device, keep in mind the possibility of relay attacks and implement additional protection measures accordingly.
Abstract: Given the computational cost and technical expertise required to train machine learning models, users may delegate the task of learning to a service provider. We show how a malicious learner can plant an undetectable backdoor into a classifier. On the surface, such a backdoored classifier behaves normally, but in reality, the learner maintains a mechanism for changing the classification of any input, with only a slight perturbation. Importantly, without the appropriate “backdoor key”, the mechanism is hidden and cannot be detected by any computationally-bounded observer. We demonstrate two frameworks for planting undetectable backdoors, with incomparable guarantees.
First, we show how to plant a backdoor in any model, using digital signature schemes. The construction guarantees that given black-box access to the original model and the backdoored version, it is computationally infeasible to find even a single input where they differ. This property implies that the backdoored model has generalization error comparable with the original model. Second, we demonstrate how to insert undetectable backdoors in models trained using the Random Fourier Features (RFF) learning paradigm or in Random ReLU networks. In this construction, undetectability holds against powerful white-box distinguishers: given a complete description of the network and the training data, no efficient distinguisher can guess whether the model is “clean” or contains a backdoor.
Our construction of undetectable backdoors also sheds light on the related issue of robustness to adversarial examples. In particular, our construction can produce a classifier that is indistinguishable from an “adversarially robust” classifier, but where every input has an adversarial example! In summary, the existence of undetectable backdoors represent a significant theoretical roadblock to certifying adversarial robustness.
A zero-day vulnerability in uClibc and uClibc-ng, a popular C standard library, could enable a malicious actor to launch DNS poisoning attacks on vulnerable IoT devices.
The bug, tracked as ICS-VU-638779, which has yet to be patched, could leave users exposed to attack, researchers have warned.
DNS poisoning
In a DNS poisoning attack, the target domain name is resolved to the IP address of a server that’s under an attacker’s control.
This means at if a malicious actor were to send a ‘forgotten password’ request, they could direct it to their own email address and intercept it – allowing them to change the victim’s password and access their account.
For an IoT device, this attack could potentially be used to intercept a firmware update request and instead directing it to download malware.
The DNS poisoning vulnerability was discovered by researchers at Nozomi Networks, who revealed that the issue remains unpatched, potentially exposing multiple users to attack.
Nozomi Networks states that uClibc is known to be used by major vendors such as Linksys, Netgear, and Axis, or Linux distributions such as Embedded Gentoo. uClibc-ng is a fork specifically designed for OpenWRT, a common operating system for web routers.
The library maintainer was unable to provide a fix, according to Nozomi. The researchers said they would refrain from sharing technical details or listing vulnerable devices until a patch is available.
“It’s important to note that a vulnerability affecting a C standard library can be a bit complex,” the team wrote in a blog post this week.
“Not only would there be hundreds or thousands of calls to the vulnerable function in multiple points of a single program, but the vulnerability would affect an indefinite number of other programs from multiple vendors configured to use that library.”
A campaign by APT37 used a sophisticated malware to steal information about sources , which appears to be a successor to Bluelight.
Sophisticated hackers believed to be tied to the North Korean government are actively targeting journalists with novel malware dubbed Goldbackdoor. Attacks have consisted of multistage infection campaign with the ultimate goal of stealing sensitive information from targets. The campaign is believed to have started in March and is ongoing, researchers have found.
Researchers at Stairwell followed up on an initial report from South Korea’s NK News, which revealed that a North Korean APT known as APT37 had stolen info from the private computer of a former South Korean intelligence official. The threat actor–also known as Ricochet Collima, InkySquid, Reaper or ScarCruft—attempted to impersonate NK News and distributed what appeared to be a novel malware in an attempt to target journalists who were using the official as a source, according to the report.
NK News passed details to Stairwell for further investigation. Researchers from the cybersecurity firm uncovered specific details of the malware, called Goldbackdoor. The malware is likely a successor of the Bluelight malware, according to a report they published late last week.
“The Goldbackdoor malware shares strong technical overlaps with the Bluelight malware,” researchers wrote. “These overlaps, along with the suspected shared development resource and impersonation of NK News, support our attribution of Goldbackdoor to APT37.”
APT37 was previously seen using Bluelight as a secondary payload last August in a series of watering hole attacks against a South Korean newspaper that used known Internet Explorer vulnerabilities.
As Stairwell researchers noted, journalists are “high-value targets for hostile governments,” and often the target of cyber-espionage attacks. In fact, one of the biggest security stories of last year was various governments’ use of the NGO Group’s Pegasus spyware against journalists, among other targets.
“[Journalists] often are aggregators of stories from many individuals–sometimes including those with sensitive access,” Stairwell researchers wrote. “Compromising a journalist can provide access to highly-sensitive information and enable additional attacks against their sources.”
Ransomware is a type of malicious program that demands payment after launching a cyber attack on a computer system. This type of malware has become increasingly popular among criminals, costing organizations millions each year.
Security experts recognise that ransomware is one of the fastest-growing forms of cyber attack. Its prevalence and reach was emphasised when WannaCry, and more recently, NotPetya, exploited a flaw in Microsoft’s SMB software and spread rapidly across networks, locking away files.
For a quick guide to ransomware and what you can do to protect your business, download our free infographic.
Editor’s Note: When malware repository vx-underground launched in 2019, it hardly made a splash in the hacking world. “I had no success really,” said its founder, who goes by the online moniker smelly_vx.
But over the last couple of years, the site’s popularity has soared thanks in part to its robust Twitter presence that mixes breaking cybersecurity news with memes. The site now bills itself as “the largest collection of malware source code, samples, and papers on the internet,” with about 35 million samples overall.
vx-undergound operator smelly_vx recently talked to Recorded Future analyst and product manager Dmitry Smilyanets about the site’s goals, finances, and plans for the future. The interview, which was conducted over email in English, has been lightly edited for clarity.
Dmitry Smilyanets: I would like to start from the very beginning — please introduce yourself.
smelly_vx: Hi. I am “smelly__vx“. I am the creator of vx-underground and the guy who runs/maintains a good portion of vx-underground’s website and the vx-underground Twitter account.
I am in my early 30s. I have a wife. I have a dog. I don’t think I can say anything else which is interesting or important.
DS: Tell me about the site’s background — how did it start, how did you build it into what it is today?
VX: About vx-underground — it was created to act as the successor to the legendary vxHeaven (created by the Ukrainian dude herm1t). When I was a teenager I discovered vxHeaven and learned tons from it. It was an invaluable asset. Around 2017 or so, when I was a software engineer, I got tired of writing malware (as a hobbyist) by myself.
I began looking for vxHeaven, or whatever it had become. I was unable to find anything, to my disappointment, and one day on some random IRC server I discovered, I was conveying my disappointment to a guy named Phaith and he said to me, “Well, if you miss it so much, why don’t you make your own?” I thought this was a good idea — why not make my own? And that is precisely what I decided to do. The issue I faced was that my background was in low-level development, I primarily did C/C++ development on the Windows platform. I did not have any skills in web development, web security, system administration, etc. I also did not have any contacts, I had been a “lone wolf” for nearly a decade at this point — I was a “nobody.” However, I decided this shouldn’t be a restraining factor so I bought some random bullshit hosting, purchased the domain name ‘vx-underground’ and got to work.
I officially made vx-underground in May 2019. I had no success really, I did not have a Twitter account or any contacts or any relationships in the information security industry. I made the vx-underground Twitter account in August 2019 and, interestingly, shortly after I made the account I was contacted by a guy named Bane. Bane was a member of a group called ThugCrowd. They had a large follower base on Twitter (20,000+), they had connections, they knew their way around things, blah blah blah. ThugCrowd was very kind to me and supported the idea of a new vxHeaven. They introduced me to some people who also liked the idea of a new vxHeaven.
Unsurprisingly, in October 2019, vx-underground was banned from a lot of web hosts. I had places which housed neo-Nazis, pornography, and gambling, deny my hosting.
Nobody wanted to house malware samples, the only way I was going to get the ability to house malware samples was if I had become a company, and did paperwork and all sorts of bullshit. I did not like this idea. Luckily, and to my surprise, the people over at ThugCrowd introduced me to a group of people behind TCP.DIRECT. They also liked the idea of a new vxHeaven, as the main group of people behind it also had been on the vxHeaven forums ages ago. They assisted me with hosting, handling the web security, etc. This was very beneficial for me because, as TCP.DIRECT will confirm, I am a complete idiot with anything system administrative/web security related.
Following this introduction to TCP.DIRECT, vx-underground had essentially zero restraint. I was able to upload malware samples, malware papers, malware source code, etc. as much as I liked. The only thing I had to do then was add content and be consistent. Along the way I met a guy from the [Commonwealth of Independent States], Neogram, who assisted me with Russian translations and giving me a (metaphorical) tour of the CIS malware scene. This expanded my horizon and gave vx-underground better insight into current malware trends.
All of this happened very quickly, this ‘story’ encapsulates what happened between August 2019 and December 2019.
DS: What are your mission and goals?
VX: I don’t know. vx-underground is a library, our goal is basically to… collect malware samples, papers, and code? It exists and that is it. The closest thing to a ‘goal’ we have is simple: “more papers, more samples, more code.” It is as simple as that.
DS: Are you financially motivated? How do you monetize your work? Is it lucrative?
VX: No, we are not financially motivated. vx-underground is fueled by passion and love for the ‘game.’ In 2021 vx-underground made $13,000 all from donations. Every time I tell people vx-underground does not make money I am always greeted with shock and surprise. It appears people are unable to comprehend someone would do something for passion rather than financial gain. This is disappointing.
vx-underground is now in the process of becoming a non-profit. We will be a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational institute for computer malware education, literacy, and advancement (offensively and/or defensively).
In this video for Help Net Security, Paul Calatayud, CISO at Aqua Security, talks about cloud native security and the problem with the lack of understanding of risks to this environment.
A recent survey of over 100 cloud professionals revealed that often businesses lead the charge in cloud, they see the opportunity, they move forward, but more and more critical compute finds its way into these cloud environments, and the security teams start to take notice. Often too late, though.
The survey shows that the awareness is starting to become a problem, and the risks are not fully understood. Organizations need to get ahead of these things. To be able to apply a good cloud native security strategy, understanding the risks is imperative.
