Iranian Spies Accidentally Leaked Videos of Themselves Hacking
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:
MFA
Iranian Spies Accidentally Leaked Videos of Themselves Hacking:
When security researchers piece together the blow-by-blow of a state-sponsored hacking operation, they're usually following a thin trail of malicious code samples, network logs, and connections to faraway servers. That detective work gets significantly easier when hackers record what they're doing and then upload the video to an unprotected server on the open internet. Which is precisely what researchers at IBM say a group of Iranian hackers did.
[...] The IBM researchers say they found the videos exposed due to a misconfiguration of security settings on a virtual private cloud server they'd observed in previous APT35 activity. The files were all uploaded to the exposed server over a few days in May, just as IBM was monitoring the machine. The videos appear to be training demonstrations the Iran-backed hackers made to show junior team members how to handle hacked accounts. They show the hackers accessing compromised Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts to download their contents, as well as exfiltrating other Google-hosted data from victims.
[...] But the videos nonetheless represent a rare artifact, showing a first-hand view of state-sponsored cyberspying that's almost never seen outside of an intelligence agency.
"We don't get this kind of insight into how threat actors operate really ever," says Allison Wikoff, a senior analyst at IBM X-Force whose team discovered the videos. "When we talk about observing hands-on activity, it's usually from incident response engagements or endpoint monitoring tools. Very rarely do we actually see the adversary on their own desktop. It's a whole other level of 'hands-on-keyboard' observation."
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