According to a survey commissioned by Palo Alto Networks, many industrial organizations are hit with cyberattacks, which result in the shutdown of Operational Technology (OT) processes in a significant percentage of cases. The survey was conducted in December 2023, with nearly 2,000 respondents from 16 countries in the Americas, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. Three-quarters of respondents revealed they had detected malicious cyber activity in their OT environment.

Researchers have discovered a new variant of the "BunnyLoader" malware with a modular structure and improved evasion capabilities. In October 2023, Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers discovered BunnyLoader, a new Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) advertised for sale in multiple cybercrime forums since September 4, 2023. The BunnyLoader malware loader is written in C/C++ and is available on several forums for $250 for a lifetime license. According to researchers, BunnyLoader is in rapid development, with the authors releasing multiple updates to implement new features and address bugs.

Recent cyberattacks on water plants have driven the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to form a task force aimed at addressing the security risks that water infrastructure providers face. Attacks on US water and wastewater facilities could put a "critical lifeline" at risk and inflict significant costs on impacted communities, according to a letter from White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and EPA Administrator Michael Regan to state governors.

Robert Purbeck, an Idaho man who hacked and extorted medical clinics and a police department, has pleaded guilty in Georgia federal court to computer fraud and abuse charges. According to a release from the Northern District of Georgia announcing the guilty plea, Purbeck, who used the aliases "Lifelock" and "Studmaster," stole the personal information of over 130,000 people. In 2017 and 2018, he purchased stolen credentials from the dark web and used them to infiltrate the networks of a medical clinic in Griffin, Georgia.

Google and Mozilla recently announced web browser security updates that address dozens of vulnerabilities, including one critical severity and multiple high-severity flaws.  Chrome 123 was released in the stable channel with patches for 12 bugs, seven of which were reported by external researchers.  According to Google, the most severe of these is CVE-2024-2625, a high-severity object lifecycle issue in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine.

Researchers from the CISPA Helmholtz-Center for Information Security have detailed a new Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack vector that has been targeting application-layer protocols based on the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), threatening hundreds of thousands of hosts. According to the researchers, "Loop DoS attacks," pair servers of these protocols so that they can communicate with each other indefinitely. UDP is a connectionless protocol that does not validate source IP addresses, leaving it vulnerable to IP spoofing.

Ukrainian cyber police recently arrested three men suspected of hijacking the accounts of over 100 million internet users.  The trio, aged between 20 and 40, were arrested by police in the country’s Kharkiv region under the guidance of the regional prosecutor’s office.  The police said that the trio were operating as part of a cybercrime group and used brute-force techniques to hijack victims’ email and Instagram accounts that were protected by easy-to-guess passwords.

Nigel Smart, Chief Academic Officer at Zama, calls on organizations to prepare for the future arrival of quantum computers capable of breaking current cryptographic solutions. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently announced post-quantum-secure public key encryption and signature standards. However, Smart points out that NIST's standards only consider traditional forms of public key encryption and signatures.