Readers will no doubt be aware of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This event has far reaching implications beyond the physical world into the cyber world.
While Russia has so far directed military action at only Ukraine, we will undoubtedly see cyber-attacks on the governments, companies and consumers in the countries that are imposing sanctions on Russian entities and individuals. This broadly includes all countries in the EU, NATO, G7 and others like Australia.
We are advising all of our CyberXpert ™ users to be vigilant against the following and as a necessary step to maintain extra caution;
1. Keep an eye out for phishing emails that may seem innocuous and routine but requesting sensitive personal information such as date of birth, password or contain links to what may seem to be your bank or credit card provider.
2. Be wary of emails that request payment information, banking information, password changes and always check that any such emails were requested by yourself and are not unsolicited.
3. Make sure you enable 2 Factor Authentication on all accounts where possible and make sure that you use secure and unique passwords on financial accounts. Remember that reusing the same passwords and passwords made up from easily obtainable information such as favourite bands or pet names etc are all information that could be potentially exploitable against you in a cyber-attack.
4. If you are a person of significance from a social or political background, be careful when posting from personal profiles as these could lead to isolated or targeted cyber-attacks aimed at taking over your profiles.
DynaRisk’s risk Cyber Xpert for Individuals along with our Breach Checks are here to help our users defend against cyber-attacks and reduce impact on your life. Log back into your account and check the actions log for outstanding actions.
If you have any specific questions or need to find out more, refer to the Cyber Xpert Help section, or Log in to your Cyber Xpert account and reach out to our support team using the Support page
More now on Dynarisk’s view of elevated hacker activity that we are actively observing.
We will specifically see increasingly visible attacks on banking and other financial institutions, insurance companies, government, energy, marine, telecommunications, media, NGO`s and the services providers to these sectors like technology, professional services and others. Even if the Russian government does not overtly carry out cyber-attacks against companies and individuals in western countries, "patriotic" Russian cyber criminals and affiliated groups will seize on this opportunity to launch attacks in the form of ransoms, denial of service, defacements, scams, data theft and more. We have already seen this type of hacker chatter taking place.
The hacker in the following example has already boasted about targeting the US strategic command and leaking their data. The hacker states he doesn’t want payment for the data as “I already got a contract with the Russians.”
Another hacker with an avatar of Putin conducted a poll to see which side of the argument the forum members were on, stating he is supporting “Team Russia.” The poll result stands at 66% of respondents saying they were siding with Russia.
Anti-Russian hackers are also attacking back with the hacker group Anonymous claiming to be conducting operations against them and warning of collateral damage to the private sector.
Stay Safe Online
Dynarisk Cyber Surveillance Team