Cybercrime Current Events: Background Check Organization Breach, a Repossessed Ransomware Blog, Feuding Forums, and Double Arrest of “J.P. Morgan”
There’s so much to keep up with in the world of cybercrime…especially for security practitioners. Leaky Weekly is a bi-weekly podcast hosted by security researcher Nick Ascoli as he dives into the most pressing stories on data leaks, cybercrime, and the dark web in the last week or so. On this episode of Leaky Weekly, […]
Launching Leaky Weekly with Flare, Cybercrime Current Events Podcast
There’s so much to keep up with in the world of cybercrime…especially for security practitioners. Leaky Weekly is a bi-weekly podcast hosted by security researcher Nick Ascoli as he dives into the most pressing stories on data leaks, cybercrime, and the dark web in the last week or so. Tune in for current events every […]
Ransomware in Context: 2024, A Year of Tumultuous Change
2024 has started off dramatic shifts in the ransomware landscape. In December of 2023 international law enforcement took down the BlackCat leaks site, leading to the group removing all ethical restrictions for their affiliates and declaring all organizations in Western Europe and the United States viable targets to include nuclear power plants and childrens hospitals. […]
LockBit’s Conversation on XSS Forum with an Initial Access Broker
In February of 2024, admins of the Russian hacking forum XSS banned the primary LockBit account active on the forum. The ban was the result of a dispute between LockBit, and an initial access broker operating under the username “aa.” The following is a conversation between AA and LockBit, posted on XSS as aa sought […]
Threat Spotlight: Data Extortion Ransomware Threats
Over the last few years, the ransomware landscape has changed significantly. Between 2022 and 2023, ransomware attacks increased by more than 100% year-over-year, with more attacks consisting of double and triple extortion. At a high level, the categories of ransomware can be defined as: Modern ransomware attacks are no longer a lone individual sitting at […]
Implement Continuous Threat Exposure Management: A Quick Guide for 2024
This year, Gartner named “Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)” as one of the top trends for Optimizing for Resilience. This is a response to increasing attack surfaces and thus cybercrime, and is the approach that best suits the evolving threat landscape. Organizations’ attack surfaces have exponentially increased over the past few years largely due to […]
Modern Cyber Warfare: Crowdsourced DDoS Attacks
Over the past few years, politically motivated threat actors have increasingly gone online to find allies for their causes. While ten years ago most hactivism like this was anonymous, modern actors favoring certain political elements or governments leverage a broader ecosystem. Since Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks require little technical skill, they offer a […]
Initial Access Broker Landscape in NATO Member States on Exploit Forum
Initial access brokers (IABs) gain unauthorized access to the system then sell this access to other malicious actors. Based on a large sample of IAB posts on the Russian-language hacking forum Exploit.in (Exploit), IABs increasingly target entities within NATO member states, with research revealing recent activity in 21 of 31 countries. Additionally, access to organizations […]
Threat Spotlight: New Frontier of AI Exploits
As machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) become increasingly complex, they pose new possibilities for organizations and threat actors. Over the last fifteen years, neural networks and deep learning technologies have evolved at a rapid pace. Over the past four years, from the release of GPT1 through today’s GPT4, AI models have evolved from […]
Threat Spotlight: Data Extortion Ransomware: Key Trends in 2023
Ransomware Trends Overview As ransomware’s fundamental nature shifts from encryption to data exfiltration, organizations’ data backup and recovery practices no longer protect them from attacks. Over the course of the past few years, the cybercriminal landscape changed too. More and more criminal ransomware organizations are adopting “as-a-Service” business models on the dark web which open the […]
