Department of Justice | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A 31-year-old Moldovan national has been sentenced to 42 months in prison in the U.S. for operating an illicit marketplace called E-Root Marketplace that offered for sale hundreds of thousands of compromised credentials, the Department of Justice (DoJ) announced. Sandu Boris Diaconu was charged with conspiracy to commit access device and computer fraud and possession of 15 or more unauthorized access devices. He pleaded guilty on December 1, 2023. "The E-Root Marketplace operated across a widely distributed network and took steps to hide the identities of its administrators, buyers, and sellers," the DoJ  said  last week. "Buyers could search for compromised computer credentials on E-Root, such as usernames and passwords that would allow buyers to access remote computers for purposes of stealing private information or manipulating the contents of the remote computer." Prospective customers could also search for RDP and SSH credentials based on various filter c

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Friday unsealed an indictment against an Iranian national for his alleged involvement in a multi-year cyber-enabled campaign designed to compromise U.S. governmental and private entities. More than a dozen entities are said to have been targeted, including the U.S. Departments of the Treasury and State, defense contractors that support U.S. Department of Defense programs, and an accounting firm and a hospitality company, both based in New York. Alireza Shafie Nasab, 39, claimed to be a cybersecurity specialist for a company named Mahak Rayan Afraz while participating in a persistent campaign targeting the U.S. from at least in or about 2016 through or about April 2021. "As alleged, Alireza Shafie Nasab participated in a cyber campaign using spear-phishing and other hacking techniques to infect more than 200,000 victim devices, many of which contained sensitive or classified defense information,"  said  U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the So

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

A married couple from New York City has pleaded guilty to money laundering charges in connection with the 2016 hack of cryptocurrency stock exchange Bitfinex, resulting in the theft of about 120,000 bitcoin. The development comes more than a year after Ilya Lichtenstein, 35, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 33, were  arrested in February 2022 , following the seizure of roughly 95,000 of the stolen crypto assets that were held by the defendants. The funds were valued at $3.6 billion at the time. Since then, the U.S. government said it has seized another approximately $475 million tied to the breach. "Lichtenstein used a number of advanced hacking tools and techniques to gain access to Bitfinex's network," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ)  said . "Once inside their systems, Lichtenstein fraudulently authorized more than 2,000 transactions in which 119,754 bitcoin was transferred from Bitfinex to a cryptocurrency wallet in Lichtenstein's control." He is

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday  announced  the seizure of three domains used by cybercriminals to trade stolen personal information and facilitate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for hire. This includes weleakinfo[.]to, ipstress[.]in, and ovh-booter[.]com, the first of which allowed its users to traffic hacked personal data and offered a searchable database containing illegally amassed information obtained from over 10,000 data breaches. The database consisted of seven billion indexed records featuring names, email addresses, usernames, phone numbers, and passwords for online accounts that could be accessed through different subscription tiers. The shutdown of weleakinfo[.]to comes more than two years after a related internet domain named weleakinfo[.]com was  confiscated in January 2020 , with law enforcement officials arresting 21 individuals in connection to the operation later that year. Last May, one of its operators was  sentenced  to two year