Currently, the news which is hitting google headlines when it comes to cyber attacks is the Symantec’s latest blog post which says that it has identified hacking group ‘Whitefly’ as a source which targeted Singapore’s health care services provider SingHealth in between June- July 2018.
Symantec’s Blog post says that the said hacking group has been operating since May 2017 and has targeted many organizations from Asia and few from the west. Its main motive is to steal vital info from companies such as healthcare, media, telecommunications and engineering sectors.
Whitefly is known to hit its targets with customized malware hacking tools which mostly try to exploit Powershell Scripts and is known to target its organizations for long periods of time in order to steal high volumes of data.
SingHealth released a statement in January this year saying that the attack was sophisticated bearing the characteristics of an Advanced Persistent Threat Group.
In other news related to cyber attacks, Microsoft Corporation has released a press statement which links hackers from Iran for cyber attacks targeting thousands of companies in more than 200 companies.
Microsoft statement stress on the fact that the Iranian hackers mainly launched cyber attacks on oil& gas companies along with heavy machinery manufacturing firms operating in Saudi Arabia, Germany, UK, India, and the US.
Holmium hacking group also is known as APT33 in dark world is suspected to be behind the attack which infected more than 2,200 employees of firms by installing malicious codes in their IT infrastructure through phishing emails.
What’s most interesting about the news is that it comes just a week after the Californian based cybersecurity firm FireEye named Iranian Group called APT39 for targeting telecoms industries from the Middle East and a nuclear power plant based in a renowned western country.
Coming to the third buzzing news on Google which is related more to espionage than cyber attack, Chinese tech firm Huawei has released a press statement today saying that it has filed a suit against the 2019 US Defense Bill that prevents US federal agencies from buying or using its company’s equipment and services. The suit was filed in a US District of Plano, Texas and openly challenges the white house to prove the allegations that Huawei’s 5G network equipment indulging in espionage by transferring sensitive data to remote servers based in China.
“As the US Congress has repeatedly failed to produce evidence that Huawei products conduct espionage we are compelled to take this legal action as a proper and last resort,” said Guo Ping, Chairman, Huawei.
Guo said that the company will seek unspecified financial damages for imposing unconstitutional restrictions on the use of the equipment which eventually tarnished the image of the company in the international market.
