Telecommunications giant Frontier Communications recently informed the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that certain systems were shut down following a cyberattack. The incident was identified on April 14, when a third party “gained unauthorized access to portions of its information technology environment.” According to Frontier, the attack was likely the work of a cybercrime group that gained access to various types of data, including personally identifiable information. The company has notified proper authorities, and an investigation into the incident is still ongoing.

Security researchers at CyberSN warn that the overall number of cybersecurity job postings in the US decreased by 22% from 2022 to 2023. The researchers said this decline is alarming and could impact national security, as some of these roles are essential for maintaining organizational and national cyber defenses. The most significant decline is in research roles, which saw a general 69% drop year-on-year between 2022 and 2023. According to the researchers this suggests a move away from proactive threat analysis and mitigation.

CyLab Security and Privacy Institute researchers will present ten papers and participate in one special interest group at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2024). One of the papers is titled "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cybervulnerability Impact Assessment for Energy Critical Infrastructure." The researchers interviewed 18 experts in the field of energy critical infrastructure to compare what information they believe is necessary to assess the impact of computer vulnerabilities contained by energy operational technology.

Sophos X-Ops has found 19 "cheap, independently produced, and crudely constructed" junk gun ransomware variants on the dark web. These junk gun variants aim to disrupt the affiliate-based Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model that has dominated the ransomware market. Instead of selling or buying ransomware to or as an affiliate, attackers develop and sell simple variants for a one-time fee. Other threat actors can use such variants to attack small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as well as individuals.

A new Android banking malware called "SoumniBot" uses a less common obfuscation technique, exploiting flaws in the Android manifest extraction and parsing procedure. The method allows SoumniBot to bypass standard Android security measures and steal information. Researchers discovered and analyzed the malware, providing technical details on how it uses the Android routine to parse and extract APK manifests. This article continues to discuss findings regarding the SoumniBot malware.

According to Microsoft Threat Intelligence research, known vulnerabilities in OpenMetadata's open source metadata repository have been actively exploited since early April, allowing threat actors to launch Remote Code Execution (RCE) cyberattacks on unpatched Kubernetes clusters. OpenMetadata is an open source platform that serves as both a management tool and a central repository for metadata. Researchers published information in mid-March on five new vulnerabilities that impacted versions before v1.3.1.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) recently charged Moldovan national Alexander Lefterov, the owner and operator of a large-scale botnet that infected thousands of computers across the United States.  Also known as Alipako, Uptime, and Alipatime, the 37-year-old man from Chisinau was indicted in December 2021 for aggravated identity theft, computer fraud, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.  The DoJ noted that Lefterov and his henchmen used malware to steal credentials from the infected devices.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has announced that it is investigating a cyberattack in which information was compromised. The organization stated that the attack targeted local Information Technology (IT) infrastructure in UN City, a complex in Copenhagen that houses nearly a dozen UN agencies. On March 27, the UNDP learned that a data-extortion actor had stolen data, including human resources and procurement information.