Bite Sized Cyber Crime
A podcast with short episodes that discuss cyber crime cases, security problems, and infamous malware. I make my episodes quick and easy to understand so you get the story without the filler and too much technical jargon. Links to all my sources on my pastebin https://pastebin.com/u/BiteSizedCyberCrime
Episodes
The holiday season is a rather expensive time of year, not just with gift buying but with scams that take advantage of the season. One thing rather unexpected however, was a Christmas Eve update that drained the wallets of some TrustWallet users.
Sources: https://pastebin.com/NHqAjqzM
Most threat actors come and go with the times, not lasting more than a couple years. Prince of Persia was assumed to be one such group, but it turns out they not only returned but never left in the first place.
Sources: https://pastebin.com/9yJ1fxP3
Usually ransomware targets large entities, but as always no one is truly safe online. This specific malware targets individual android users sideloading apps from illegitimate sources.
Sources: https://pastebin.com/3J3uAVHt
CIS recently released an advisory warning of a stealthy backdoor that has been targeting VMWare shots and stealing data from snapshots of virtual machines. These are the details of that backdoor
Sources: https://pastebin.com/ppt9V3b1
In the security world it is becoming more and more necessarily to invest in controls around AI and the web browser. This attack targets both and often leaves absolutely no trace on your end, as the attack never leaves the browser.
Sources: https://pastebin.com/rz744p1b
Cloudflare had a massive outage on Tuesday morning that many suspected was some kind of big attack by nation state hackers, however it turns out to have been a lot more simple than that. A little internal error caused a domino effect that took out much of the web for several hours.
Sources: https://pastebin.com/ftmYtFv7
We have our fears of AI taking over the world and killing all the humans, which we are still rather far from, however a more urgent worry is the use of AI automomous agents taking the place of hackers themselves. Once such group managed to offload 80% of the technical hacking work to Claude Code.
Sources: https://pastebin.com/PzTM7dZT
Last week we discussed a weird email sent to students, staff, alumni, or basically anyone associated with the University of Pennsylvania. This week some new developments in the case occurred that could leave data at risk, but the attacker's motivations and actions seem odd.
Sources: https://pastebin.com/GDKhPmrE
I learned how to generate censorship bleeps! But also a strange and vulgar email was sent out to alumni, donors, clients, staff, and current students from the University of Pennsylvania warning that a data leak was inevitable. But is there any substance?
Sources: https://pastebin.com/MbJwdrYA
We've talked about North Korean threat actors being hired for jobs in order to steal data, but what about North Korean threat actors hiring people to steal data? Seems backwards, but it's been going on for years and recently teh defense sector has become a target of these attacks.
Sources: https://pastebin.com/yrWK4K20
Discord is a popular chat app used by gamers, technologists, and even local communities. Recently however, it potentially had a very serious data breach involving the government identification of its users.
Sources: https://pastebin.com/1QJdNW5b
In many doomsday scenarios AI become sentient and try to kill mankind, but has this already started to happen? Many sensational headlines would lead you to believe so, but the answer is a little more complicated than that...
Sources: https://pastebin.com/sgjfdr8j
3 notorious hacking groups have teamed up to form one huge site threatening to extort 39 major organizations out of their Salesforce data, which was acquired through a series of phishing attacks. Though Salesforce was not actually a target themselves, they also face extortion and some reputational damage.
Sources: https://pastebin.com/jNr9Qsrr
Oh how the mighty have fallen. It takes a lot for a business to survive even 5 years after an attack, let alone 158. So what could kill such a strong business that clearly has it figured out? It turns out the Achilles heel is often just a single bad password.
Sources: https://pastebin.com/7M6vKycy
Spear phishing can potentially get even more realistic with the use of generative AI. Recently North Korean threat actors leveraged prompt injection to create surprisingly realistic South Korean military documents
Sources: https://pastebin.com/H4qH2YuK
Supply chain attacks are one of the most devastating if done right, and one of the biggest in the history of NPM just occurred. However it was probably less fruitful than the attackers were hoping...
Sources: https://pastebin.com/GfquiVgZ
Tech giants have been collecting a lot of data on us for years with the use of cookies, and though efforts have been made to reduce this they have been futile. France recently fined Google hundreds of millions for cookie consent violations, but it may only be a minor cost of business to them.
Sources: https://pastebin.com/GkPf9W1c
Usually in phishing cases, you are emailed by the attackers first, but can attackers lie in wait for you to email them first? Surprisingly, yes. How is this even possible? Find out today!
Sources: https://pastebin.com/4b2vsrwH
Everyone may get elaborate revenge fantasies but few follow through due to the bad outweighing the satisfaction. One man, sensing he was to be terminated soon, however, decided if he were to go he would try to take the whole company down with him. Last week he was sentenced to 4 years in prison.
Sources: https://pastebin.com/Pi0YSFUt
Water and energy are both critical resources to society. In a display of fear, pro-Russia hacktivists compromised a dam in Norway remotely, demonstrating that cyberattacks can have very physical implications.
Sources: https://pastebin.com/mwwrPwtR
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