Sunday, March 13, 2022 // (IG): BB //Weekly Sponsor: DiyGarage_SoCal
Japan's Denso hit by apparent ransomware attack
FROM THE MEDIA: Denso Corp., a top Toyota Motor Corp. supplier, was targeted by a group of hackers threatening to disclose its industrial secrets unless the Japanese maker of electronic auto parts paid ransom money, NHK reported Sunday. A representative for Denso said that there was an unauthorized access to its network in Germany, NHK reported. If confirmed, the incident would mark the second recent cyberattack against a Toyota supplier. The world’s top carmaker idled all of its factories in Japan two weeks ago after parts supplier Kojima Press Industry Co. was hit by an attack to its systems. Although production resumed after a day, the incident was yet another blow to Toyota as it was seeking to recover production lost in recent months to chip shortages and COVID-related disruptions. “We are hearing from Denso that there’s no impact on business operations,” said Hideaki Homma, a spokesman for Toyota. Pandora, the group that allegedly accessed Denso’s systems, threatened to disclose the supplier’s trade secrets including email, invoices and part diagrams on a website on the dark web, NHK reported, citing Japanese cyber security firm Mitsui Bussan Secure Directions Inc.
READ THE STORY: Japantimes
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After Nvidia and Samsung, gaming giant Ubisoft suffers cyber attack
FROM THE MEDIA: The hacking group behind Nvidia and Samsung took credit for Ubisoft data breach. French video game company Ubisoft has admitted that a cyber security incident temporarily disrupted some games, systems and services. The incident came to light after graphics chip maker Nvidia and South Korean giant Samsung suffered a data breach this month. Ubisoft said its IT teams were working with leading external experts to investigate the issue. “As a precautionary measure we initiated a company-wide password reset. Also, we can confirm that all our games and services are functioning normally and that at this time there is no evidence any player personal information was accessed or exposed as a by-product of this incident,” it said in a statement late on Friday.
READ THE STORY: Siasat
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After Using Disinformation Against the West for Years the Kremlin finds Itself under Attack on Social Media.
FROM THE MEDIA: One of the wildest aspects of the first Great Information War is not just that you can follow Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in real time, minute by minute and step by step, but you can also join in. Because in 2022, information is power. And one of the many huge unexpected geopolitical shifts of the last week is that this power has been returned to the people. On March 4 in Russia, Vladimir Putin, a man who is now scared of his own shadow, took the extraordinary step of attempting to outlaw information. He banned Facebook. He shut down Twitter. He passed a new law that declares journalism a criminal offense: any journalist found to have published “fake news” on the war in Ukraine now faces up to 15 years in prison. It is, like so many things in the last week, incredible, unprecedented, horrifying – but more importantly it is also desperate and absurd. Because in 2022 you cannot ban information. It is like trying to ban oxygen. It is the kind of move that one of his grey-faced Soviet predecessors might have made. It is as modern and up-to-date as a typewriter. Only a fool would make predictions right now, but here is one anyway: it proves that Putin, the founding father of what has come to be known as “information war,” just lost the information war.
READ THE STORY: Milwaukee Independent
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Why Banks and NATO Are Worrying About a Future ‘Quantum Attack’
FROM THE MEDIA: How soon might an ultra-powerful computer be able to crack any password? Soon enough for billions to be spent preparing now. Investment and new milestones in quantum computing are bringing the prospect of an ultra-powerful computer that can crack any code closer to reality. Alphabet Inc.’s Google and International Business Machines Corp. are racing to increase the number of qubits — the quantum equivalent of bits that encode data on classical computers — on a quantum chip. Firms like Canada’s D-Wave Systems Inc. and French startup Alice&Bob are offering quantum computing services to clients that want broad processing power to solve complex problems. But any technological advance comes with concerns. While a fully-fledged quantum computer doesn’t appear to exist yet, there is already worry about its ability to crack encryption underpinning critical communications between companies and between armed forces. Andersen Cheng, founder and chief executive officer of London quantum-encryption firm Post Quantum, joined me on Twitter Spaces on Wednesday to talk about why NATO, banks and other entities need to prepare for a world where “quantum attacks” are possible. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation.
READ THE STORY: Bloomberg
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Recruits flock to Ukraine’s cyber-army
FROM THE MEDIA: Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine has been met with fierce resistance throughout the country’s towns and cities. As Russian forces have moved closer to Kyiv, lawyers, students and actors have taken up arms to defend their country from invasion. They are not the only ones: Volunteers have also flocked to join a Ukrainian volunteer “IT Army” that’s fighting back online. At around 9pm local time on February 26, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and the minister for digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, announced the creation of the volunteer cyber army. “We have a lot of talented Ukrainians in the digital sphere: developers, cyber specialists, designers, copywriters, marketers,” he said in a post on his official Telegram channel. “We continue to fight on the cyber front.” Ukraine has seen other volunteer-organized cyber defense and attack efforts leading up to and early in the war effort. Separately hacktivists, including the hacking group Anonymous, have claimed DDoS attacks against Russian targets and taken data from Belarusian weapons manufacturer Tetraedr. But the development of the IT Army, a government-led volunteer unit that’s designed to operate in the middle of a fast-moving war zone, is without precedent.
READ THE STORY: The Times // Wired
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Russian-Ukrainian politics put Australian Government IT infrastructures at the mercy of cyber-warfare
FROM THE MEDIA: Redefining “gangs” in the age of ransomware and critical assets targeted as collateral. For decades, when anyone heard the word “gang” they automatically associated it with violent crime in the streets, or the slums, or “the hood”; the underworld of hustling, drive-by shootings, drug trafficking, intertwined with ulterior motives, politics, and monetary incentive. But today, gang warfare and violent crime have taken a new shape and position. In the world of government and political conflict, so much of what makes the news about severe threats to national and local security is related to malicious attacks on critical IT infrastructures, with highly sensitive data and critical assets being compromised. From secret service research to warfare strategies and allied communication, we’re talking about global-scale international threats. Today, the malicious attacks of gangs have transitioned into cyberspace, frequently executed through online communication on social media. It entails bribery and ransomware breaches and correlated conspiracies in the internet’s gloomy underworld of the dark web.
READ THE STORY: Geektime
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VPN use spikes as Russians seek out facts on Ukraine war
FROM THE MEDIA: Russia’s attempt to block independent news of its war in Ukraine has been met with a surge in digital circumvention tools. Digital freedom groups report increasing use of VPNs and secure communication apps like Telegram as foreign media have evacuated their staff or suspended operations in Moscow and Russia’s media regulator has sought to block local sources of news. With speculation that President Vladimir Putin may go further and cut Russia off from the global internet, some groups are investigating a return to shortwave radio — a medium more commonly associated with the Cold War era. Even by Russia’s heavy-handed censorship standards, recent weeks have seen an unprecedented censorship campaign unleashed on the free press and the free flow of information following the army’s invasion of Ukraine. “The major challenge that the Kremlin is facing today is to protect the legitimacy of this war,” says Gregory Asmolov, a Russian-born lecturer at the Digital Humanities Department of King’s College London.
READ THE STORY: PTV News
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One-Eyed Man is King, Reversing the Chain of Command in Counter-Insurgency Operations
FROM THE MEDIA: Roughly from 1816 until the start of World War I, the Netherlands East Indies Colonial Army, later renowned as Koninklijk Nederlandsch Indisch Leger (KNIL)[1], continuously battled local factions in the Indonesian archipelago. As part of the colonial power structure, the KNIL focused on the conquest of territory and, in other cases, the fights targeted insurgents and other groups who did not want to serve under colonial rule[2]. All those years, the majority of the Netherlands forces involved, gained valuable expertise in fighting this type of war. The Netherlands East Indies Decolonization War of 1945-1950 (or “Independence War” as the Indonesian nationalist freedom fighters called it), with a vast contribution of the Netherlands Marine Corps Brigade (MARBRIG), was one of the last large scale irregular warfare operations of the Netherlands forces in the East-Indies[3], with the West New Guinea Dispute of 1950-1962 being the very last[4]. According to a 1945 quote of Dutch Prime Minister Wim Schermerhorn, the Dutch contribution to the colonial war has largely been framed in terms of “restoring peace, order and security”[5]. As stated by Schermerhorn the Netherlands forces fight against the evil that the nationalist Indonesian uproar represented was virtuous. He solely painted the Dutch as virtuous. However, Schermerhorn omitted to look at the complex situation of the soldiers and marines from native Indonesian and half-blooded Indo-European descent, who fought for the Netherlands interests in the Dutch East Indies. The history of minority groups in the Dutch East Indies Colonial War has been neglected and only a limited scholarship in this area has focused on telling these groups’ stories.
READ THE STORY: Small Wars Journal
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Russia-Ukraine Cyberwar: Five Things We Learned
FROM THE MEDIA: As Russia keeps shelling Ukrainian targets, and millions of refugees flee the battlefields, a parallel, no less devastating war is taking place in the cybersphere. Several elements were anticipated and the U.S. has been building Ukraine’s cyberdefenses to address them: advanced attacks on government websites and infrastructure such as rail systems (to prevent mass evacuation of citizens), border-crossing IT systems in neighboring countries, as well as the use of offensive tools to launch influence campaigns. Russian cyberattacks vary from so-called distributed denial of service attacks (also known as DDos), “wipers” (which delete your databases and system files) and increased ransomware attacks on Western targets by state-backed cybercrime groups, such as Conti and RagnarLocker. Another expected, though severe, move was Russian attacks on telecom systems (such as ViaSat). Several developments, however, are new to the cyberwarfare and cybercrime ecosystems. These mark a tectonic change in the field after cessation of hostilities.
READ THE STORY: Haaretz
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Ukraine forced to stop production of semiconductor-grade neon, critical components for chips
FROM THE MEDIA: Ukrainian neon supply firms Ingas and Cryoin have recently closed down following the continued attack on Ukraine from Russia. According to reports, Ukraine alone produces half of the world's neon, which are important components in the production of electronic chips. Reports further suggest that there have been threats to raise prices and aggravate the semiconductor shortage as well. Some 45% to 54% of the world's semiconductor-grade neon, critical for the lasers used to make chips, comes from two Ukrainian companies, Ingas and Cryoin, according to Reuters calculations based on figures from the companies and market research firm Techcet. Global neon consumption for chip production reached about 540 metric tons last year, Techcet estimates. Both firms have shuttered their operations, according to company representatives contacted by Reuters, as Russian troops have escalated their attacks on cities throughout Ukraine, killing civilians and destroying key infrastructure.
READ THE STORY: The Daily Star
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DOJ Task Force 'KleptoCapture' to Target Crypto Exchanges in Sanctions Evasion Crackdown
FROM THE MEDIA: A new Department of Justice (DOJ) task force, KleptoCapture, will enforce sanctions against Russian oligarchs as well as target anyone who helps hide their money, including crypto service providers, a senior DOJ official reportedly said Friday. The KleptoCapture task force was launched on March 2. It is “an interagency law enforcement task force dedicated to enforcing the sweeping sanctions, export restrictions, and economic countermeasures that the United States has imposed, along with allies and partners, in response to Russia’s unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine,” the DOJ described. Noting that the KleptoCapture task force will take a “broader view” of who it regards as a facilitator in sanctions evasions, the DOJ official stated: Our goal is to bring any appropriate charge against any sanctioned Russian oligarch or entity, and those who would help them to evade economic sanctions. In addition to those who willingly aid in money laundering, the official stressed that “actors who stick their heads in the sand, or blind themselves to moving dirty money may face money laundering charges for their role in concealing those proceeds.”
READ THE STORY: News Bitcoin
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Items of interest
Musk tipped to launch Galileo replacement as Putin BANS UK and withholds funds(Article)
FROM THE MEDIA: ELON MUSK has been tipped to help launch the UK's OneWeb satellites after Russia banned Britain from using its facilities and withheld the funds. Last week, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, blocked the launch of a batch of OneWeb satellites in retaliation to the harsh sanctions imposed by the UK over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Roscosmos was scheduled to launch a batch of 36 OneWeb satellites on Friday, March 4, on a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, impounded the satellites and warned that OneWeb had two days to provide "comprehensive legally binding" guarantees that the satellites would not be used for military purposes. Speaking to Express.co.uk, David Morris, Conservative MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, warned that those probes will likely have to be scrapped. He said: “There's an assumption that the kits being held in Russia have been written off, we can't be using that now. “We've got to get some more built and send them up a different way.
READ THE STORY: Express
How To Bypass Online Paywalls-Basic Initial try(Video)
FROM THE MEDIA: Most people are aware of paywalls, but what are they? A paywall is a way of charging for online content. Newspapers are one example of a website using a paywall. A newspaper paywall is a system where a reader must either subscribe or pay to read past a certain number of articles. This is a way for the newspaper to make money from their online content. If you were to visit a newspaper website, without a subscription, you would be presented with a paywall stopping you from reading any content.
Paywall Bypass-Turn off Java(Video)
FROM THE MEDIA: This wont work on all but on most. So I believe we should support journalism… so if you like the site pay for it.
About this Product
These open source products are reviewed from analysts at InfoDom Securities and provide possible context about current media trends in regard to the realm of cyber security. The stories selected cover a broad array of cyber threats and are intended to aid readers in framing key publicly discussed threats and overall situational awareness. InfoDom Securities does not specifically endorse any third-party claims made in their original material or related links on their sites, and the opinions expressed by third parties are theirs alone. Contact InfoDom Securities at dominanceinformation@gmail.com