Tag Archive for: hackers

FBI’s Chris Wray warns Chinese hackers preparing to attack US infrastructure ‘to induce panic’

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FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that a hacking group linked to the Chinese government is waiting for the right moment to “deal a devastating blow” to U.S. critical infrastructure.

Wray delivered a keynote speech at the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats in Nashville, and told national security and intelligence experts that the risks posed by the government of China to U.S. national and economic security are “upon us now.”

The director said a recent bureau investigation found that the Chinese government had gained illicit access to networks within America’s “critical telecommunications, energy, water, and other infrastructure sectors.”

“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America’s will to resist,” Wray said — the FBI explained “these vital sectors—everything from water treatment facilities and energy grids to transportation and information technology—form the backbone of our society.”

“The fact is, the PRC’s targeting of our critical infrastructure is both broad and unrelenting,” he added. “It’s using that mass, those numbers, to give itself the ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing,”

Wray said CCP-sponsored cyber actors “prepositioned” themselves to potentially mount cyber offenses against American energy companies in 2011—targeting 23 different pipeline operators, with Wray saying this helps understand current motivations.

“When one victim company set up a honeypot—essentially, a trap designed to look like a legitimate part of a computer network with decoy documents—it took the hackers all of 15 minutes to steal data related to the control and monitoring systems, while ignoring financial and business-related information, which suggests their goals were even more sinister than stealing a leg up economically,” he said.

The CCP also targeted critical infrastructure organizations through more…

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Tiny Texas City Repels Russia-Tied Hackers Eyeing Water System

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When Mike Cypert got the call that utilities in remote Texas communities were being hacked, he raced across his office to unplug the computer that ran his city’s water system.

Hale Center is a dusty, cotton-growing burg of 2,000 about five hours drive northwest of Dallas. After the alert from a software vendor in January, Cypert, the city manager, said he found thousands of attempts to breach Hale Center’s firewall, some coming from an internet address that traced back to St. Petersburg, Russia.

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Hackers are threatening to publish a huge stolen sanctions and financial crimes watchlist

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A financially motivated criminal hacking group says it has stolen a confidential database containing millions of records that companies use for screening potential customers for links to sanctions and financial crime.

The hackers, which call themselves GhostR, said they stole 5.3 million records from the World-Check screening database in March and are threatening to publish the data online.

World-Check is a screening database used for “know your customer” checks (or KYC), allowing companies to determine if prospective customers are high risk or potential criminals, such as people with links to money laundering or who are under government sanctions. The hackers told TechCrunch that they stole the data from a Singapore-based firm with access to the World-Check database, but did not name the firm.

A portion of the stolen data, which the hackers shared with TechCrunch, includes individuals who were sanctioned as recently as this year.

Simon Henrick, a spokesperson for the London Stock Exchange Group, which maintains the database, told TechCrunch: “This was not a security breach of LSEG/our systems. The incident involves a third party’s data set, which includes a copy of the World-Check data file. This was illegally obtained from the third party’s system. We are liaising with the affected third party, to ensure our data is protected and ensuring that any appropriate authorities are notified.”

LSEG did not name the third-party company, but did not dispute the amount of data stolen.

The portion of stolen data seen by TechCrunch contains records on thousands of people, including current and former government officials, diplomats, and private companies whose leaders are considered “politically exposed people,” who are at a higher risk of involvement in corruption or bribery. The list also contains individuals accused of involvement in organized crime, suspected terrorists, intelligence operatives and a European spyware vendor.

The data varies by record. The database contains names, passport numbers, Social Security numbers, online crypto account identifiers and bank account numbers, and more.

World-Check is currently owned by the London Stock Exchange Group following…

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Hackers Found a Way to Open Any of 3 Million Hotel Keycard Locks in Seconds (Video)

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https://www.vecteezy.com/photo/24543747-hand-using-keycard-for-smart-digital-door-lock-while-open-or-close-the-door-at-home-or-apartment-nfc-technology-fingerprint-scan-pin-number-smartphone-and-contactless-lifestyle-conceptshttps://www.vecteezy.com/photo/24543747-hand-using-keycard-for-smart-digital-door-lock-while-open-or-close-the-door-at-home-or-apartment-nfc-technology-fingerprint-scan-pin-number-smartphone-and-contactless-lifestyle-concepts

When thousands of security researchers descend on Las Vegas every August for what’s come to be known as “hacker summer camp,” the back-to-back Black Hat and Defcon hacker conferences, it’s a given that some of them will experiment with hacking the infrastructure of Vegas itself, the city’s elaborate array of casino and hospitality technology.

But at one private event in 2022, a select group of researchers were actually invited to hack a Vegas hotel room, competing in a suite crowded with their laptops and cans of Red Bull to find digital vulnerabilities in every one of the room’s gadgets, from its TV to its bedside VoIP phone.

One team of hackers spent those days focused on the lock on the room’s door, perhaps its most sensitive piece of technology of all. Now, more than a year and a half later, they’re finally bringing to light the results of that work: a technique they discovered that would allow an intruder to open any of millions of hotel rooms worldwide in seconds, with just two taps.

Today, Ian Carroll, Lennert Wouters, and a team of other security researchers are revealing a hotel keycard hacking technique they call Unsaflok. The technique is a collection of security vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to almost instantly open several models of Saflok-brand RFID-based keycard locks sold by the Swiss lock maker Dormakaba. The Saflok systems are installed on 3 million doors worldwide, inside 13,000 properties in 131 countries.

By exploiting weaknesses in both Dormakaba’s encryption and the underlying RFID system Dormakaba uses, known as MIFARE Classic, Carroll and Wouters have demonstrated just how easily they can open a Saflok keycard lock. Their technique starts with obtaining any keycard from a target hotel—say, by booking a room there or grabbing a keycard out of a box of used ones—then reading a certain code from that card with a $300 RFID read-write device, and finally writing two keycards of their own. When they merely tap those two cards on a lock, the first rewrites a certain piece of the lock’s data, and the second opens it.

“Two quick taps and we open the door,” says Wouters, a researcher in the…

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