China-linked APT group Salt Typhoon compromised some US ISPs
China-linked threat actors compromised some U.S. internet service providers as part of a cyber espionage campaign code-named Salt Typhoon. The state-sponsored hackers aimed at gathering intelligence from the targets or carrying out disruptive cyberattacks. The Wall Street Journal reported that experts are investigating into the security breached to determine if the attackers gained access to Cisco Systems routers, which are core network components of the ISP infrastructures.
Threat Actor Leverages Compromised Account of Former Employee to Access State Government Organization | CISA
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) conducted an incident response assessment of a state government organization’s network environment after documents containing host and user information, including metadata, were posted on a dark web brokerage site. Analysis confirmed that an unidentified threat actor compromised network administrator credentials through the account of a former employee—a technique commonly leveraged by threat actors—to successfully authenticate to an internal virtual private network (VPN) access point, further navigate the victim’s on-premises environment, and execute various lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) queries against a domain controller.[1] Analysis also focused on the victim’s Azure environment, which hosts sensitive systems and data, as well as the compromised on-premises environment. Analysis determined there were no indications the threat actor further compromised the organization by moving laterally from the on-premises environment to the Azure environment.
