New report shows Chinese hackers engaging in cyber espionage by stealing SMS messages and phone records to track and monitor top diplomats and foreign leaders.
Cyber Security
Cyber criminals, state-sponsored hackers and even the occasional disgruntled employee are constantly looking to gain unauthorized access for a variety of purposes: theft of money, cyber espionage, personal information for sale or for use in scams, and damage to critical infrastructure for just a few of the most common.
So how does an organization mitigate an entire world full of continual cyber attacks? Just as buildings have a number of necessary elements of physical security: access control, cameras, alarms and so on; there are similar key elements of cyber security that are absolutely vital for just about any modern business.
It starts with identifying and closing the most common doors that attackers use. For example, phishing attacks on employees are far and away the most common initial point of entry. The breach of even a low-level employee account can quickly turn into an escalation in access privileges and the ability to reach sensitive information. This is also true of smart devices, which are generally more poorly secured than computers and phones.
Chinese hackers are on a massive cyber espionage campaign targeting over 75 organizations throughout the world and using vulnerabilities in various routers and cloud services.
Chinese hackers may have had illicit access to a federal surveillance system for months before being discovered and rousted. The access was apparently gained by compromising US telecoms Verizon and AT&T.
Chinese hackers are now focusing on the outer layers of target networks, even antivirus software and firewalls, as an entry point for stealthy cyber attacks that can last for years.
A botnet used by a state-backed Chinese hacking group has lost at least some of its capacity, according to security officials that spoke to Reuters anonymously. The Volt Typhoon group has been targeting US critical infrastructure since at least mid-2021.
Botnet discovered by Chinese researchers introduced a backdoor and a web shell on compromised AT&T VoIP servers, mostly in the US, for DDoS attacks and data exfiltration.
Researchers at Shanghai University used the D-Wave quantum computer to demonstrate decryption of a working RSA public key. The incident does demonstrate that the timeline to crack encryption that is not quantum-resistant, something that many feel is still at least 10 years off, may be shorter than expected.
Pinduoduo, a popular Chinese shopping app has been suspended from the Google Play Store after traces of malware were found in the code of previous app versions. Suspected purpose was to pore through user data and find information related to competing shopping apps.
Chinese spies known as Buckeye group are alleged to be using some of the NSA cyber weapons as early as March 2016, long before Shadow Brokers released them in April 2017.
A Chinese startup leaked information of more than 214 million social media users obtained through data scraping, including private information not provided on social profiles.










