A National Science Foundation (NSF) grant has been awarded in support of Northeastern University professor David Choffnes and other computer scientists exploring the vulnerabilities of Internet of Things (IoT) devices as part of the "Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation" (SPHERE) project. Choffnes says the remote IoT lab will be the first of its kind. Anyone can schedule a time to configure the lab's IoT devices to simulate different deployments and interact with them in automated ways to uncover security and privacy flaws.

A new report released by Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 delves into how the BianLian ransomware group operates as it evolves to focus primarily on the healthcare and manufacturing sectors, as well as the US and Europe. BianLian first appeared around 2021 and gained widespread attention in 2022 when it hit companies in the US, UK, and Australia with ransomware attacks. The group now only steals data and threatens to publish it if victims refuse to pay.

According to Check Point Research's annual review, organizations faced a significant increase in cyberattacks in 2023. Specifically, one out of every ten companies suffered a cyberattack last year, which was 33 percent higher than in 2022. Ransomware was the most common offender, as during 2023, 10 percent of companies struck by a cyberattack faced an attempted ransomware installation. In 2022, this percentage remained at 7 percent. This article continues to discuss the increase in cyberattacks faced in 2023, ransomware trends, and the sectors affected.

Two malicious packages on the NPM package registry use GitHub to store Base64-encrypted SSH keys stolen from developer systems. One module was downloaded 412 times, and the other was downloaded 1,281 times before being removed by the NPM maintainers. The software supply chain security company ReversingLabs, which made the discovery, noted that there were eight different versions of one module and more than 30 versions of the other. Both modules run a postinstall script after installation, with each capable of retrieving and executing a different JavaScript file.

The Black Basta ransomware gang says it hacked Southern Water, a major player in the UK's water industry. Southern Water is a private utility company that collects and treats wastewater in Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, West Sussex, East Sussex, and Kent. The company provides public water to roughly half of the area. The Black Basta ransomware group added Southern Water to the list of victims on its Tor data leak website, threatening to release the stolen data on February 29, 2024. The allegedly stolen data includes 750 gigabytes of personal documents and corporate documents.

Laurie Mercer, a security architect at HackerOne, emphasizes that no company is invulnerable to cyberattacks. However, when an attack occurs, many companies continue to stay silent. Over half of security professionals revealed that their organizations maintain a security culture through obscurity, with more than one-third confessing to being secretive about their cybersecurity activities.

The Australian government has publicly named Aleksandr Ermakov, 33, a Russian cybercriminal, as responsible for the Medibank data breach, which affected 9.7 million people.  Ekmakov has been issued a cyber sanction under the Australian Autonomous Sanctions Act 2011 for his role in the incident in 2022.  The cyberattack led to the publication of 9.7 million records on the dark web.  This contained the personal information of Australian citizens, including names, dates of birth, Medicare numbers, and other sensitive medical data.

Researchers from Aqua Security's Team Nautilus conducted a statistical analysis of the top 50,000 most downloaded packages in the NPM registry, revealing that users download deprecated packages an estimated 2.1 billion times per week. The researchers stress that deprecated, archived, and orphaned NPM packages may contain unpatched or unreported vulnerabilities, putting projects that rely on them at risk.

In October, VMware patched a critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability in its vCenter Server and Cloud Foundation enterprise products. Researchers from the security company Mandiant have now revealed that the Chinese cyber espionage group known as UNC3886 had been exploiting the vulnerability for 1.5 years before a fix was made. UNC3886 has historically focused on technologies that cannot have Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) deployed. The group UNC3886 is known for using zero-day vulnerabilities to achieve their objectives without being detected.