The Blacksite Weekly Intelligence Report:
Week of November 14th, 2022
U.S Officials Charge Russian Nationals with Operating Z-Library
Anton Napolsky (33) and Valeriia Ermakova (27), two Russian nationals, were charged with intellectual property crimes linked to Z-Library, a pirate online eBook repository. The defendants were arrested on November 3, 2022, in Argentina by the country’s authorities at the request of U.S. law enforcement. Z-Lib was one of the world’s largest public and free-to-access written content repositories, containing 11 million books and 84 million articles in a massive 220 TB database.
More information: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/two-russian-nationals-charged-running-massive-e-book-piracy-website
Iranian Hackers Hack Federal Agency Network
Iranian government-sponsored threat actors have been blamed for compromising a U.S. federal agency by taking advantage of the Log4Shell vulnerability in an unpatched VMware Horizon server. CISA did not attribute the event to a particular hacking group. The affected organization, per CISA, is believed to have been breached as early as February 2022 by weaponizing the vulnerability to add a new exclusion rule to Windows Defender that allow listed the entire C:\ drive. Microsoft, in a report last month, revealed cybercriminals are targeting credentials in the LSASS process owing to the fact that it “can store not only a current user’s OS credentials but also a domain admin’s”.
More information: https://www.cisa.gov/uscert/ncas/alerts/aa22-320a
RapperBot DDOS Campaign Targets Game Servers
New samples of malware called RapperBot are being used to build a botnet capable of launching DDoS attacks against game servers. Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researchers say the malware is heavily inspired by the Mirai botnet, whose source code leaked in October 2016, leading to the rise of several variants. The malware is designed to only target appliances that run on ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, SH4, SPARC, and SPARC architectures, the researchers said. Researchers: “It is highly likely that they are being operated by a single threat actor or by different threat actors”.
More information: https://www.fortinet.com/blog/threat-research/new-rapperbot-campaign-ddos-attacks
Google Pays $391 Million in Fines for Secretly Tracking Users
Google agrees to settle with 40 states in the U.S. over charges the company misled users about the collection of personal location data. Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum: “For years Google has prioritized profit over their users’ privacy”. The investigation was sparked by a 2018 report that revealed Google was continuing to track users’ locations even when they turned off “location history” in their account settings, effectively undermining privacy controls. Google is required to show additional information to users upon enabling or disabling a location-related setting, avoid hiding key information about location tracking.
More information: https://www.doj.state.or.us/media-home/news-media-releases/largest-ag-consumer-privacy-settlement-in-u-s-history/
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