The New Zealand Herald reports that, after a good start yesterday, New Zealand’s NZX stock exchange again sustained a disruptive distributed denial-of-service attack. The exchange was able to work through the attack and continue trading by deploying a range of workarounds and alternative procedures. The incident remains under investigation by GCSB and law enforcement authorities.
CrowdStrike has released a report on Pioneer Kitten (also known as “Fox Kitten” or “Parisite”), an Iranian threat actor believed to be a contractor providing cyberespionage support to the government of Iran. Last month Pioneer Kitten was observed in various black market souks offering to sell access to compromised networks. CrowdStrike thinks this represents an attempt on the group’s part at “revenue diversification.” Pioneer Kitten’s espionage targets have for the most part been in Israel or North America, and the network access they’re selling appears to be just bycatch of their espionage take. ZDNet observes that the biggest customers of such initial access brokers tend to be ransomware gangs.
TechCrunch reports that Apple’s well-regarded notarization process, designed to keep malware out of its app store, has permitted some malware to slip into approved software. Malwarebytes this morning argued that this ought to shake Mac users out of security complacency.
Night Lion Security has taken a look at the ways in which cybercriminals monetize exploitation of online games like Fortnite. It amounts in the aggregate to a billion-dollar black market in accounts and in-game commodities.
And a happy sixth birthday to the US Army’s Cyber Branch.