NEW After hearing thousands of last words, this hospital chaplain has advice for the living
Hospital chaplain J.S. Park opens up about death, grief and hearing thousands of last words, and shares his advice for the living.
The elite Russian state hackers behind last year's massive SolarWinds cyberespionage campaign hardly eased up this year, managing plenty of infiltrations of U.S. and allied government agencies and foreign policy think tanks with consummate craft and stealth, a leading cybersecurity firm reported.
Also Monday, Microsoft announced that it had disrupted the cyber-spying of a state-backed Chinese hacking group by seizing websites it used to gather intelligence from foreign ministries, think tanks and human rights organizations in the U.S. and 28 other countries, chiefly in Latin America and Europe.
Microsoft said a Virginia federal court had granted its request last Thursday to seize 42 web domains that the Chinese hacking group, which it calls Nickel but which is also known as APT15 and Vixen Panda, were using to access targets typically aligned with China's geopolitical interests. It said in a blog that “a key piece of the infrastructure the group has been relying on” in its latest wave of infiltrations was removed. The seized domains include “elperuanos.org,” “pandemicacre.com” and “cleanskycloud.com.”
The dual announcements, though unrelated, highlight the unrelenting drumbeat of digital spying by its top U.S. geopolitical rivals, whose cyber-intrusion skillset is matched only by that of the United States.
A year after it discovered the SolarWinds intrusions, Mandiant said the hackers associated with Russia's SVR foreign intelligence agency continue to steal data “relevant to Russian interests” with great effect using novel, stealthy techniques that it detailed in a mostly technical report aimed at helping security professionals stay alert. It was Mandiant, not the U.S. government, that disclosed SolarWinds.
While the number of government agencies and companies hacked by the SVR was smaller this year than last, when some 100 organizations were breached, assessing the damage is difficult, said Charles Carmakal, Mandiant's chief technical officer. Overall, the impact is quite serious. “The companies that are getting hacked, they are also losing information.”
“Not everybody is disclosing the incident(s) because they don't always have to disclose it legally,” he said, complicating damage-assessment.
The Russian cyber spying unfolded, as always, mostly in the shadows as the U.S. government was consumed in 2021 by a separate, eminently “noisy” and headline-grabbling cyber threat - ransomware attacks launched not by nation-state hackers but rather criminal gangs. As it happens, those gangs are largely protected by the Kremlin.
The Mandiant findings follow an October report from Microsoft that the hackers, whose umbrella group it calls Nobelium, continue to infiltrate the government agencies, foreign policy think tanks and other organizations focused on Russian affairs through the cloud service companies and so-called managed services providers on which they increasingly rely. The Mandiant researchers said the Russian hackers “continue to innovate and identify new techniques and tradecraft” that lets them linger in victim networks, hinder detection and confuse attempts to attribute hacks to them.
Mandiant did not identify individual victims or describe what specific information may have been stolen but did say unspecified “diplomatic entities” that received malicious phishing emails were among the targets.
Often, the researchers say, the hackers' path of least resistance to their targets were cloud-computing services. From there, they used stolen credentials to infiltrate networks. The report describes how in one case they gained access to one victim's Microsoft 365 system through a stolen session token. And, the report says, the hackers routinely relied on advanced tradecraft to cover their tracks.
One clever technique discussed in the report illustrates the ongoing cat-and-mouse game that digital espionage entails. Hackers set up intrusion beachheads using IP addresses, a numeric designation that identifies its location on the internet, that were physically located near an account they are trying to breach - in the same address block, say, as the person's local internet provider. That makes it highly difficult for security software to detect a hacker using stolen credentials posing as someone trying to access their work account remotely.
Microsoft expressed no illusions that the website seizures it announced Monday would discourage the Chinese hackers, who it has been tracking since 2016. It said the takedowns were of infrastructure it has been tracking since 2019, much of it exploiting on-premises -- as opposed to cloud-based - Exchange Server and SharePoint systems. The company has used the legal takedown tactic in 24 lawsuits to date, Microsoft said, knocking out a total of 600 sites used by nation-state actors and 10,000 by cybercriminals.
The SolarWinds hack exploited vulnerabilities in the software supply-chain system and went undetected for most of 2020 despite compromises at a broad swath of federal agencies - including the Justice Department - and dozens of companies, primarily telecommunications and information technology providers and including Mandiant and Microsoft.
The hacking campaign is named SolarWinds after the U.S. software company whose product was exploited in the first-stage infection of that effort. The Biden administration imposed sanctions last April in response to the hack, including against six Russian companies that support the country's cyber efforts.
Hospital chaplain J.S. Park opens up about death, grief and hearing thousands of last words, and shares his advice for the living.
French police cordoned off the Iranian consulate in Paris on Friday, where a man was threatening to blow himself up, Europe 1 radio and BFM TV.
More money will land in the pockets of some Canadian families on Friday for the latest Canada Child Benefit installment.
An apparent Israeli drone attack on Iran saw troops fire air defences at a major air base and a nuclear site early Friday morning near the central city of Isfahan, an assault coming in retaliation for Tehran's unprecedented drone-and-missile assault on the country.
American millionaire Jonathan Lehrer, one of two men charged in the killings of a Canadian couple in Dominica, has been denied bail.
Canadian banks that refuse to identify the carbon rebate by name when doing direct deposits are forcing the government to change the law to make them do it, says Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault.
A woman who recently moved to Canada from India was searching for a job when she got caught in an online job scam and lost $15,000.
The World Health Organization and around 500 experts have agreed for the first time on what it means for a disease to spread through the air, in a bid to avoid the confusion early in the COVID-19 pandemic that some scientists have said cost lives.
Prince Harry, the son of King Charles III and fifth in line to the British throne, has formally confirmed he is now a U.S. resident.
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.
Kevin the cat has been reunited with his family after enduring a harrowing three-day ordeal while lost at Toronto Pearson International Airport earlier this week.
Molly Knight, a grade four student in Nova Scotia, noticed her school library did not have many books on female athletes, so she started her own book drive in hopes of changing that.
Almost 7,000 bars of pure gold were stolen from Pearson International Airport exactly one year ago during an elaborate heist, but so far only a tiny fraction of that stolen loot has been found.
When Les Robertson was walking home from the gym in North Vancouver's Lower Lonsdale neighbourhood three weeks ago, he did a double take. Standing near a burrow it had dug in a vacant lot near East 1st Street and St. Georges Avenue was a yellow-bellied marmot.
A moulting seal who was relocated after drawing daily crowds of onlookers in Greater Victoria has made a surprise return, after what officials described as an 'astonishing' six-day journey.
Just steps from Parliament Hill is a barber shop that for the last 100 years has catered to everyone from prime ministers to tourists.
A high score on a Foo Fighters pinball machine has Edmonton player Dave Formenti on a high.
A compound used to treat sour gas that's been linked to fertility issues in cattle has been found throughout groundwater in the Prairies, according to a new study.