A team of experts at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) presented a new approach to protecting the electric grid against cyberattacks. Instead of protecting the grid and its many components piece-by-piece, the team is developing a tool capable of quickly sorting and prioritizing cyber threats. The goal is to provide grid operators with a clear blueprint for identifying and addressing the most serious threats first. This article continues to discuss the team's approach to protecting the electric grid against cyberattacks.

According to Jason Parker, an independent cybersecurity researcher, a popular tool used by many state and local governments to manage public records requests had flaws that could have enabled hackers to download unsecured files associated with records inquiries, including personal information such as IDs, fingerprints, medical reports, and more. The vulnerabilities could have also let hackers trick the system into allowing individuals to edit or change the metadata of records requests without administrators' knowledge.

A team of researchers identified significant security, privacy, and safety issues with FemTech, which is a collection of digital technologies focusing on women's health and well-being. Such technologies include apps, wearable devices, and software. The researchers found FemTech apps gaining access to users' personal contacts, camera, microphone, location, system settings, and more, posing major security and privacy risks. These apps and Internet of Things (IoT) devices use embedded sensors to collect various types of data about users, their relatives, their bodies, and their environments.

Threat actors are using malicious JavaScript injections to launch brute-force attacks on WordPress sites. According to Sucuri security researcher Denis Sinegubko, the distributed brute-force attacks target WordPress websites via the browsers of site visitors. The activity is part of an attack wave in which compromised WordPress sites are used to directly inject cryptocurrency drainers such as Angel Drainer or redirect site visitors to Web3 phishing sites with drainer malware.

A 20-year-old Remote Access Trojan (RAT) has reemerged with new variants targeting Linux and impersonating a trusted hosted domain. Palo Alto Networks discovered a new Linux variant of the Bifrost malware, also known as Bifrose, that applies the typosquatting tactic to mimic a legitimate VMware domain, allowing the malware to avoid detection. Bifrost is a RAT that has been active since 2004, gathering sensitive information from compromised systems, including hostnames and IP addresses. Bifrost Linux variants have increased significantly in recent months, raising concerns.

Researchers from Georgia Tech's College of Engineering developed web-based Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) malware capable of targeting most PLCs from major manufacturers. Their web-based PLC malware resides in PLC memory but is eventually executed client-side by different browser-equipped devices in the ICS environment. The researchers explained that the malware then uses ambient browser-based credentials to interact with the PLC's legitimate web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in order to attack the underlying real-world machinery.

According to Cybereason researchers, threat actors are using Facebook messages to spread malware called "Snake," which is a Python-based information stealer. The malware extracts credentials from the infected system and sends them to various platforms such as Discord, GitHub, and Telegram by abusing their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The threat actors send victims direct messages through Facebook Messenger, attempting to trick them into downloading archive files like RAR or ZIP files.

Fidelity Investments Life Insurance Company recently started informing roughly 28,000 individuals that their personal information was compromised in a data breach at third-party services provider Infosys McCamish System (IMS).  The data breach, Fidelity says, was the result of a cyberattack on IMS’ systems, which occurred in October 2023 and led to unauthorized access to data that IMS was holding on behalf of its customers.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has released its 2023 Internet Crime Report, revealing a 22 percent increase in reported losses compared to 2022, totaling a record $12.5 billion. The number of relevant complaints received by the FBI in 2023 reached 880,000, a 10 percent increase over the previous year. Business Email Compromise (BEC), investment fraud, ransomware, and tech/customer support and government impersonation scams caused the most financial losses in the US last year.

In 2023, at least 225,000 sets of OpenAI credentials were listed for sale on the dark web, potentially enabling access to sensitive data sent to ChatGPT. Researchers at Group-IB discovered ChatGPT accounts compromised by information stealer malware between January and October 2023. The stolen credentials came from devices infected with LummaC2, Raccoon, and other infostealers. These malware tools look for and gather sensitive information stored on infected devices, such as login credentials and financial information.