Tag Archive for: quiet

Why Have Russian Hackers Been So Quiet in Ukraine?

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Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images

From the 2016 election to a spree of ransomware attacks that disrupted private industry last summer, Americans are all too familiar with the chaos Russian hackers can create. But during the first two weeks of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, the cybercriminals in league with the Kremlin haven’t played a major role. Anton Dahbura, the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, explains why we’ve seen so little from the country’s notorious electronic agitators, and whether they might become more aggressive in the coming weeks.

Russia hasn’t disabled Ukraine’s internet or disabled the country’s entire power grid. What sort of cyberattacks have Russia hackers successfully pulled during the war?
With cyberconflict, one never knows exactly what’s going on — we can only put pieces together from different sources that we trust. The impact of the hackers by Russia and its cronies on Ukraine has been relatively minor. We know there were some preliminary attacks on government systems a few weeks ago. Almost everybody extrapolated that that would turn into something more severe, but it hasn’t really materialized.

The other thing is it’s obviously not business as usual in Ukraine. When you think about retail operations, health care, education — all of those aspects of the Ukrainian society and economy have been severely disrupted, if they’re operational at all. It doesn’t make sense to try to shut down a store’s IT system if the store is not even open, or if there is no power to that area. So the impact of cyberattacks has changed, and to some extent has gone by the wayside.

Now, we’re also distinguishing cyberconflict from espionage. It’s also not clear if Russia has hooks into Ukrainian intelligence systems and communications systems, which is another potential aspect of this.

Is this kind of hacking something that’s better-suited for agitating during peacetime than in a hot war?
This is an interesting case study. Now you have all…

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Joker malware makes another quiet return to the Google Play Store

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The makers of the Joker malware are a resilient lot, for they have managed to sneak the malware into the Google Play Store again after being spotted and kicked out on more than one occasion.

Earlier this week, the Belgian Police said the Joker malware was spotted in eight Google Play Store apps before the apps were removed by Google. The malware’s presence on the app store doesn’t bode well for Android users as it quietly subscribes users to paid services without their authorisation, thereby draining their bank accounts dry.

Joker malware is used by cyber criminals on a large scale, so much so that in January last year, Google kicked out as many as 1,700 applications from the Play Store that were found hiding the malware. By then, these applications were downloaded by millions worldwide, giving operators of the malware the opportunity to carry out billing fraud campaigns on a large scale.

According to Google, while earlier versions of Joker, that appeared sometime in 2017, were engaged in carrying out SMS fraud, later versions of the malware (also known as Bread malware) were designed for billing fraud that involved the malware authors using injected clicks, custom HTML parsers, and SMS receivers to automate billing processes without requiring any interaction from the user.

In a blog post published last year, Google noted that developers of Joker malware used just about every cloaking and obfuscation technique under the sun in an attempt to go undetected. Many of the malware’s samples appeared to be designed specifically to attempt to slip into the Play Store undetected and at peak times of activity, Google observed up to 23 different apps from this family submitted to the Play Store in one day.

According to the Belgian Police, the eight apps found hiding the Joker malware this time are Auxiliary Message, Element Scanner, Fast Magic SMS, Free CamScanner, Go Messages, Super Message, Great SMS, and Travel Wallpapers. The choice of apps indicates that hackers are quite intent on exploiting the general demand for document scanning and instant messaging services to victimise millions.

What makes the use of the Joker malware even more threatening is that…

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A malware attack against accounting software giant Wolters Kluwer is causing a ‘quiet panic’ at accounting firms – CNBC

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A malware attack against accounting software giant Wolters Kluwer is causing a ‘quiet panic’ at accounting firms  CNBC

A malware attack on Wolters Kluwer, a popular tax and accounting software platform, has left many in the accounting world unable to work this week and …

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