AvosLocker is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) gang that first appeared in mid-2021. It has since become notorious for its attacks targeting critical infrastructure in the United States, including the sectors of financial services, critical manufacturing, and government facilities. In March 2022, the FBI and US Treasury Department issued a warning about the attacks.

Requirements for reporting cybersecurity incidents to some regulatory or government authority are not new, but there has always been a large amount of inconsistency, globally, in exactly what the requirements are. More recently, there’s been a growing trend across government and regulatory bodies in the United States towards shorter timeframes for reporting of cybersecurity incidents. Here’s a brief rundown of the recent activity.

Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) is a cybersecurity threat targeting cloud environments. EDoS attacks exploit the elasticity of clouds, particularly auto-scaling capabilities, to inflate the billing of a cloud user until the account reaches bankruptcy or large-scale service withdrawal. EDoS attacks exploit the cloud’s economies of scale to disrupt or discontinue the availability of cloud services and infrastructure that support applications, systems, and corporate networks.

Endpoint devices played a big part in malware and ransomware attacks in 2021. According to a study covered by Help Net Security, security researchers detected more malware and ransomware endpoint infections in the first nine months of the year than they did for all of 2020. Attack scripts leveraging PowerSploit, Cobalt Strike, and other tools were particularly prevalent in that nine-month period, having grown 10% over the previous year after having already climbed 666% compared to 2019.

One of the main challenges of OT security is the problem of compatibility. OT components often differ significantly from each other in terms of age and sophistication as well as software and communication protocols. This complicates asset discovery and makes it difficult to establish a consistent cybersecurity governance approach. Combating asset blindness in OT security begins with taking account of these differences.

With just a few weeks until the April 15 deadline for US individuals and businesses to file their tax returns, scammers are as busy as ever. Security researchers at Cofsense have warned that they have seen a number of malicious email campaigns which pose as communications from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The emails which purport to come from “IRS.gov”, claim to contain tax forms (such as a W-9) that need to be filled out by the recipient.

How often have you heard someone say “Cybersecurity is complicated!”? If you’re a practitioner in the cybersecurity industry you’ll have heard these words often, probably along with “…and it’s really boring too!”