The United Cyber Caliphate’s hit list of New Yorkers looks like recycled stuff, and not the results of any recent data breach. The threat’s disturbing for all that, but one shouldn’t let ISIS’s violent incitement lead one to overestimate the group’s technical skills.
Trend Micro has been looking into ISIS’s actual online communications toolkit. They find that terrorists (and they share this preference with the civilized world) like Gmail a lot (34% of their accounts are Gmail). Their next favorite email service is Mail2Tor (21%), then other secure services like Sigaint (19%). Yahoo’s got a surprising 12% share of the market. With instant messaging, Telegram is the favorite (34%) followed by Whatsapp (15%). The self-proclaimed Caliphate has sharked up some DIY tools—Trend Micro talks about six, four of which are encryption apps, the remaining two being information-sharing tools.
Kaspersky warns that the hackers who breached the Qatar National Bank have hit a second, unnamed bank, and will be releasing stolen data soon.
A Slack security engineer has warned that ImageMagick, the widely used image manipulation suite, is vulnerable to remote code execution, and that these vulnerabilities are being exploited in the wild. A Metasploit module is expected today; ImageMagick is offering interim mitigation advice in its online forum.
Ransomware continues to circulate. Fox-IT outlines RDP as an infection vector, and ThreatTrack offers a look at Petya. The FBI again reminds victims not to pay.
Iran and Russia show a striking, tender concern for the privacy of US NSA employees.