The Department of Justice (DoJ) recently charged Moldovan national Alexander Lefterov, the owner and operator of a large-scale botnet that infected thousands of computers across the United States.  Also known as Alipako, Uptime, and Alipatime, the 37-year-old man from Chisinau was indicted in December 2021 for aggravated identity theft, computer fraud, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.  The DoJ noted that Lefterov and his henchmen used malware to steal credentials from the infected devices.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has announced that it is investigating a cyberattack in which information was compromised. The organization stated that the attack targeted local Information Technology (IT) infrastructure in UN City, a complex in Copenhagen that houses nearly a dozen UN agencies. On March 27, the UNDP learned that a data-extortion actor had stolen data, including human resources and procurement information.

UK police infiltrated and disrupted the "LabHost" Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) operation that made cybercriminals more than £1 million ($1.3 million) from thousands of targets. Europol described LabHost as one of the largest PhaaS platforms, providing fraudsters the tools to conduct sophisticated phishing and smishing (SMS phishing) campaigns. According to London's Metropolitan Police, which led the law enforcement operation against the PhaaS platform, LabHost hosted up to 40,000 phishing sites by 2024, with 2,000 criminals paying a monthly subscription fee.

Michigan healthcare organization Cherry Street Services (Cherry Health) has recently started notifying over 180,000 individuals that their personal information was compromised in a ransomware attack.  Cherry Health noted that the incident occurred on December 21, 2023, and disrupted certain systems, suggesting that file-encrypting ransomware might have been involved.  In a filing with the Maine Attorney General’s Office this week, Cherry Health confirmed that ransomware was involved in the attack and revealed that approximately 184,000 individuals were affected by the incident.

A Northwestern University Computer Science team took first place in the fuzzing tool competition at the 17th International Workshop on Search-Based and Fuzz Testing (SBFT 2024). Fuzz testing, also known as fuzzing, is an automated testing method used to detect coding errors and security vulnerabilities in software, operating systems, or networks by generating a massive amount of invalid or random data inputs and monitoring for system crashes, failures, or memory leaks.

Since mid-2022, a previously unknown backdoor called "Kapeka" has been used in cyberattacks targeting Eastern Europe, including Estonia and Ukraine. WithSecure attributes the malware to the Russia-linked Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group "Sandworm," also known as APT44 or Seashell Blizzard. According to security researcher Mohammad Kazem Hassan Nejad, the malware serves as an early-stage toolkit for its operators as well as provides long-term access. Kapeka includes a dropper that launches and executes a backdoor component on the infected host.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) have released "Securing Election Infrastructure Against the Tactics of Foreign Malign Influence Operations." The guidance document details the latest tactics used in foreign malign influence operations to shape US policies, decisions, and more. The document discusses common tactics in foreign malign influence operations, provides examples, and suggests mitigation strategies for election infrastructure stakeholders.

The New York state Legislature's bill drafting office was hit with an apparent cyberattack early today, April 17.  According to Gov. Kathy Hochulthe scope of the attack was not immediately clear but the bill drafting system has been down since early Wednesday.  The office is responsible for printing legislation for lawmakers at the state Capitol in Albany.  The investigation into the incident is ongoing, and they are working on getting their systems back up and running. 

According to security researchers, threat actors have been observed exploiting unpatched Atlassian servers and deploying a Linux variant of Cerber ransomware, also known as C3RB3R.  The attacks target CVE-2023-22518, a critical security vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence Data Center and Server, enabling an unauthenticated attacker to reset Confluence and create an administrator account.  Researchers noted that the vulnerability allows threat actors to gain control over systems, risking loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability.