Fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh continues. It’s increasingly accompanied by supporting cyber operations. Cisco’s Talos unit finds that an unspecified threat actor, probably a foreign espionage service, is deploying PoetRAT malware against government and civil targets in Azerbaijan, often through phishing campaigns themed to take advantage of the ongoing conflict.
Microsoft has identified active exploitation of the Zerologon vulnerability (CVE-2020-1472) by the Iranian threat group Redmond tracks as “Mercury,” but which is more generally known as “MuddyWatter.” CISA directed late in September that all US Federal agencies patch Zerologon.
The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warns that the long-familiar Emotet Trojan has increasingly figured in attacks against government organizations in the several US states. Emotet went quiet in February, returned in July, and began to appear in attacks against state and local governments in August.
The US House has released the results of its anti-trust inquiry into Big Tech. The subcommittee investigating concluded that Silicon Valley is a hive of monopoly on a scale not seen since the Nineteenth Century’s Gilded Age. “To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.” Google’s parent Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are specified as the new robber barons.
The report so far hasn’t affected markets, where, Seeking Alpha reports, the companies seem to be holding steady.