Supplemental Cyber Highlights – August 29, 2023

The following posts are useful for general awareness of current threats, vulnerabilities, guidance, and other cyber-related news or updates. These resources have been curated by the WaterISAC analyst team as items of broad relevance and benefit that do not need supplemental analysis at this time.

Critical Infrastructure Resilience

• Presidential council recommends launching a Department of Water to confront cyberthreats, climate change (Cyber Scoop)
• Water Cybersecurity Dispute Reveals Infrastructure Problem (Forbes)
• OT Cybersecurity Insurance: Present Landscape and Future Outlook (TX One)
• The Importance of Benchmarking OT Security Against Peer Organizations (Radiflow)
• Building foundations for cyber risk management from the ground up across OT, ICS environments (Industrial Cyber)

IT Malware & Threats

• Microsoft: Stealthy Flax Typhoon hackers use LOLBins to evade detection (Bleeping Computer)
• Phishing-as-a-Service Gets Smarter: Microsoft Sounds Alarm on AiTM Attacks (The Hacker News)
• 3 Malware Loaders Detected in 80% of Attacks: Security Firm (Security Week)
• BEC Trends: Payroll Diversion Dominates and Sneaky Multi-Persona Attacks Emerge (Trustwave)
• Creative QakBot Attack Tactics Challenge Security Defenses (InfoSecurity Magazine)
• Researchers Discover Reply URL Takeover Issue in Azure (InfoSecurity Magazine)

IT Vulnerabilities

• PoC for no-auth RCE on Juniper firewalls released (HelpNetSecurity)
• Cisco fixes 3 high-severity DoS flaws in NX-OS and FXOS software (Security Affairs)

Ransomware Awareness

• Attacks on Citrix NetScaler systems linked to ransomware actor (Bleeping Computer)
• LockBit 3.0 Ransomware Builder Leak Gives Rise to Hundreds of New Variants (The Hacker News)
• New Study Sheds Light on Adhubllka Ransomware Network (InfoSecurity Magazine)
• Akira Ransomware Targeting VPNs without Multi-Factor Authentication (Cisco)
• 6 Ransomware Trends & Evolutions to Watch For (Trend Micro)

Cyber Resilience

• IEEE 802.11az provides security enhancements, solves longstanding problems (HelpNetSecurity)
• Defying the Dark Arts: Strategies for Countering Cyber Threats (Hackread)

General Awareness

• Chinese law enforcement linked to largest covert influence operation ever discovered (The Record)
• Canadian Cyber Centre publishes Baseline Cyber Threat Assessment, predicting increased cybercrime activity (Industrial Cyber)

Security Awareness Reminders (posts to pass along to staff)

• Four common password mistakes hackers love to exploit (Bleeping Computer)
• How to spot you’re on a hacked website (Kaspersky)

Technical Posts (for security analysts, sysadmins, and other nerds)

• Amplifying OT Visibility with PCAP Analysis (SynSaber)
• MalDoc in PDFs: Hiding malicious Word docs in PDF files (Bleeping Computer)
• What’s in a name? Strange behaviors at top-level domains creates uncertainty in DNS (Cisco Talos)