There was a lot of activity related to hackers in Iran. The US, UK, and Australia issued an advisory on Wednesday saying that Iranian state hackers were targeting critical infrastructure targets. Two Iranian men were indicted by the US Justice Department. Iran has been asserting itself over the last several years, but Russia and China are usually the focus of the conversation.
Another country has been active with cyberattacks recently. It's Belarus! Since the beginning of the year, it's been assumed that the Ghostwriter hacking and misinformation group was Russia. Mandiant revealed this week that Ghostwriter is an operation with ties to the military of the country, focused on interfering with NATO interests as well as those of the country's neighbors.
We looked at the best password managers around, and yes, you do need one. DuckDuckGo has a new feature that blocks trackers on your phone. NordicTrack has made it harder for its customers to access a God mode that lets them watch whatever they want on their treadmill's giant display, so they're fighting back by sharing workarounds online.
Take a few minutes out of your day to read this in-depth investigation into how Amazon's data security let it's customers down. It's full of information that you won't forget.
There's more to come. WIRED didn't cover all the security news in depth. Stay safe and click on the headlines to read the full story.
A Canadian teen was arrested this week for allegedly stealing $36.5 million worth of cryptocurrencies from a single US victim. That is the largest theft of its kind. The apparent method was a so-called sim- swap attack, in which the culprit transfers a target's phone number to their own device, enabling them to intercept two-factor authentication codes. Even though there are ways to protect yourself against a sim- swap, there is no guarantee of stopping them. In this case, investigators claim that the teen used their haul to purchase a high-value gamer tag in the sim- swap community.
The Evil Corp., a criminal hacking group operating in Russia, caused at least $100 million in damage by stealing from hundreds of banks around the world. They've recently embraced the same types of online gangs that they've always embraced, and that's attacking the National Rifle Association. A reporter from the British Broadcasting Corporation traveled to Moscow and a nearby town in search of Evil Corp members.
The FBI sent thousands of emails last weekend warning recipients of a cyberattack. It was the FBI that had been compromised. The agency's email system was compromised by a hacker and they were able to send fake messages. Their interest was prankery rather than chaos, as was told to Brian Krebs.
Stripchat exposed the data of 65 million users, 421,000 models, and 719,000 chat messages over a period of three days earlier this month, in an incident similar to last year's Cam4 leak. It's not clear if any bad actors accessed the data before Stripchat secured it, as the lapse was discovered by a security researcher and appears to have been addressed fairly quickly. The stakes are high for performer and customer alike, and any exposure of private information is a cause for concern.
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