Surfwatch Labs Hacker Groups How To Address Them

We sometimes forget to take a peek at what is going on with the rest of the world.

Surfwatch Labs Hacker Groups How To Address Them

With SurfWatch Las, you know what threats to worry about and how to address them before its too late.

The primary goal of cyber-espionage is to uncover company or government secrets, such as military plans, blueprints, or coveted intellectual property.

SurfWatch Labs has collected CyberFacts on exactly 300 targets tied with espionage so far this year.

According to researchers, about 95 of the data obtained in the attack by North Korea was defense related.

One of the most coveted pieces of information that was obtained were blueprints for the wings of F-15 fighter jets.

However, evidence obtained from these attacks have been traced back to the North Korean capital Pyongyang.

The names of both groups have been lovingly named Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear.

Cozy Bear first infiltrated the database in the summer of 2015 and was monitoring email and chat communications, while Fancy Bear appeared last April and targeted opposition research files.

The Fancy Bear group was able to obtain information held on Donald Trump.

Information held on Hillary Clinton and several other GOP political action committees were also targeted.

The email had a malicious attachment that, if opened, would have loaded two DLL files on the officials computer.

The group has also been called Fancy Bear which is tied to the Democratic National Committee hack APT28, Sednit, Pawn Storm, and Strontium.

First of all, the RTF document attached to the email didnt show any content, which immediately pointed to something being wrong.

Also, old IP addresses and CC server domains were used from past campaigns, which was another flag that this email was malicious.

The group is identified through their ShimRat malware and is unique from other APT groups because they exclusively use social engineering tactics to target computer networks, not exploits.

More specifically, the groups attack vector of choice is spear phishing.

The group has also been spotted targeting companies in the United States, Canada, Germany, India, and Singapore.

Jiaqiang was also intending to provide this source code to the Chinese National Health and Planning Commission where he was previously employed.

In total, he faces a maximum of 75 years in prison if convicted of all charges.

Each organization is different, and in these differences there are a variety of ways cybercriminals can exploit a company.

Security tools such as firewalls and antivirus software protect against several of these threats, but they cannot protect an organization from everything.

This is where cyber threat intelligence plays a crucial role.

This is a lot of information for any organization to handle on their own, especially since the cyber landscape continues to change.