Free Republic

In a secret chat room run by a group of Russian-affiliated cybercriminals, a hacker expressed excitement about a plan to attack and disable more than 400 U.S. hospitals. “There will be panic,” the hacker wrote, in Russian. The hacking enterprise, called the Trickbot Group by federal prosecutors, and its affiliates had already collected hundreds of millions of dollars by shutting down emergency rooms, city governments and public schools since 2018. Security researchers and U.S. officials say the internal conversations amount to the most complete and candid public look yet at the operations of a criminal ransomware enterprise. A malware developer...

Just how did a self-employed web site designer and mother of two come to work for one of the world’s most rapacious cybercriminal groups and then leave such an obvious trail of clues indicating her involvement with the gang? It is hard to think of an accused cybercriminal who has made more stunningly poor and rookie operational security mistakes than this Latvian senior citizen. For starters, it appears at one point in 2020 Witte actually hosted Trickbot malware on a vanity website registered in her name — allawitte[.]nl. Unlike many accused cybercriminals who hail from Russia or former Soviet countries,...

A combined team of security experts from Advanced Intelligence and Eclypsium has announced that the Trickbot trojan malware now has the ability to modify a computer's Unified Extensible Firmware Interface—the interface between the firmware on a computer motherboard and the computer's operating system—in this case, Microsoft Windows. Trickbot has been in the news of late due to its advanced capabilities. It has a modular design and is notable for its ability to gain administrative capabilities on infected computers. The entities behind the creation of the trojan are believed to be criminals in Russia and North Korea, and they have used...