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FireEye, normally the first company that cyberattack victims will call, has now admitted it too has fallen victim to hackers, which the company called a “sophisticated threat actor” that was likely backed by a nation-state.

In a blog post confirming the breach, the company’s chief executive Kevin Mandia said the nation-backed hackers have “top-tier offensive capabilities,” but did not attribute blame or say which government was behind the attack.

Mandia, who founded Mandiant, the incident response firm acquired by FireEye in 2014, said the hackers used a “novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past” to steal hacking tools used typically by red teams, which are tasked with launching authorized but offensive hacking campaigns against customers in order to find weaknesses or vulnerabilities before malicious hackers do.

Global #connectivity lets for #digitalidentity for billions of people worldwide, giving them access to #telehealth, #education, #careers, #entertainment and #finance services, as well as raising #cybersecurity and #dataprivacy concernsRe-sharing. Starlink can help telemedicine become more reliable and available to people in need. Especially those in rurual or far flung locations.


Video Source/Credit: SpaceX Youtube Channel

One interesting sub-division of SpaceX is Starlink, which is Musk’s venture into increasing global connectivity. Starlink’s mission is to use a global network of low Earth orbit satellites to eventually “deliver high speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable.” While satellite internet itself is not a novel concept, most of the traditional systems use dated technology that have far less capabilities with regards to internet speed, connectivity, and sustainability. Starlink’s goal is to provide high-speed broadband internet, using cutting-edge satellite systems that will also not add to the space pollution created by traditional systems. As of now, the company states that it “is targeting service in the Northern U.S. and Canada in 2020, rapidly expanding to near global coverage of the populated world by 2021.”

The group uses tools outside of the country for this attack campaign, as well as custom malware, including custom malware – including backdoor. Hartip – that Symantec has never used. Compromised computers at the time of the attack included domain controllers and file servers, and there is evidence that files are being filtered by some compromised computers. Attackers frequently used DLL side loading in this campaign and took advantage of the patched Zerologon vulnerability in August 2020.

Symantec first addressed this campaign when suspicious DLL-side loading activity on one the customers networks triggered a warning from Cloud Analytics technology available in Symantec Endpoint Security Complete (SESC).

The campaign is spread across the world, with a large number of regions detected as the victims of the attack. The common link between all the organisations that were attacked were their links to japan or japan based organisations. In the map you can clearly see that there was a reportedly Chinese-government-linked group attacking companies within China’s borders but, like many of the companies targeted in this campaign, the target in that instance is a subsidiary of a Japanese organization.

Initially discovered in bacteria, CRISPR-based genome editing endonucleases have proven remarkably amenable for adaptation to insects. To date, these endonucleases have been utilized in a plethora of both model and non-model insects including diverse flies, bees, beetles, butterflies, moths, and grasshoppers, to name a few, thereby revolutionizing functional genomics of insects. In addition to basic genome editing, they have also been invaluable for advanced genome engineering and synthetic biology applications. Here we explore the recent genome editing advancements in insects for generating site-specific genomic mutations, insertions, deletions, as well as more advanced applications such as Homology Assisted Genome Knock-in (HACK), potential to utilize DNA base editing, generating predictable reciprocal chromosomal translocations, and development gene drives to control the fate of wild populations.

Fraudsters redirected email and web traffic destined for several cryptocurrency trading platforms over the past week. The attacks were facilitated by scams targeting employees at GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

The incident is the latest incursion at GoDaddy that relied on tricking employees into transferring ownership and/or control over targeted domains to fraudsters. In March, a voice phishing scam targeting GoDaddy support employees allowed attackers to assume control over at least a half-dozen domain names, including transaction brokering site escrow.com.