The Original APT: Advanced Persistent Teenagers
Summary: LAPSUS$, a juvenile data extortion group whose core members are thought to range in age from 15 to 21, has since late 2021 gained access to the networks or contractors of Microsoft, NVIDIA, Okta and Samsung. Microsoft found the group used old-fashioned techniques including targeting employees at personal email addresses and phone numbers, offering to pay $20,000 a week for remote access credentials, social engineering help desk staff, bribing mobile phone store employees to hijack phone numbers, and intruding on victims' crisis communications calls.
What you should know: Tenable CEO Amit Yoran told the House Homeland Security Committee that with only $25,000 a group of teenagers could get into organizations with mature cybersecurity practices, and that deeper pockets targeting critical infrastructure should be a sobering call to action. A CXO whose organization was hit said the group works in six-hour windows on two or three accounts, a pattern he said most defenders have not optimized to stop.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Phishing & Social Engineering
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