Buckeye'd

Astounding flaws, reported by both Symantec and Ars Technica... What happended to OpSec? As importantly: The true ramifications for our country are yet unknown... Unless of course, this and other 'leaks' of the same or similar ilk - are, in fact - structured information operations of the highest caliber. Crafted to ensnare the miscreant espionage bounders wandering amongst us... You be the judge.

Key Findings

• The Buckeye attack group was using Equation Group tools to gain persistent access to target organizations at least a year prior to the Shadow Brokers leak.
• Variants of Equation Group tools used by Buckeye appear to be different from those released by Shadow Brokers, potentially indicating that they didn't originate from that leak.
• Buckeye's use of Equation Group tools also involved the exploit of a previously unknown Windows zero-day vulnerability. This zero day was reported by Symantec to Microsoft in September 2018 and patched in March 2019.
• While Buckeye appeared to cease operations in mid-2017, the Equation Group tools it used continued to be used in attacks until late 2018. It is unknown who continued to use the tools. They may have been passed to another group or Buckeye may have continued operating longer than supposed. - via Symantec Corporation's Threat Intelligence Blog

GrrCon Augusta 2018, Tomasz Bania's 'Intelligence Creating Intelligence: Leveraging What You Know To Improve Finding What You Don't ' →

Videography Credit: Irongeek (Adrian Crenshaw).

GRU'd →

via The Daily Beast's Spencer Ackerman and Kevin Poulsen, comes the tale of Guccifer 2.0, an officer of the GRU, Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (also known as, the Russian Military Intelligence Directorate); and, of course, there's this and this.. H/T

ENISA Releases 2017 Threat Report →

The European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) - has released it's Annual Threat Landscape 2017 Report (clicking the preceding link will download the artifact in PDF format). H/T to Jart Armin - Principle at CyberDefcon; a Netherlands based (registered in the UK) intelligence and threat analysis organization .

AWS GuardDuty: Human Security Employment Will Become Moot →

The apparent beginning of the end for certain information and cyber security employment categories: Behold the newly minted Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) AWS GuardDuty... H/T via the inimitable Trey Blalock of Firewall Consultants and Verification Labs.

Machine-Based Investigation: Fully →

via Motherboard writer Michael Byrne, comes this well-wrought piece on the apparent proliferation of 'bots on Twitter, ie., the implications of algorithm-driven entities on the Twitterverse. The fascinating component to this study by Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Clayton A. Davis, Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini, was the utilization of a machine-learning apparatus (and the feature-sets therein) to tease out the truth. Additional documentation (in the form of the paper) is available on arXIv. Today's MustRead.

"Part of what makes the new research interesting is the sheer number of features used in the classification model..." - Motherboard's Michael Byrne

CTI SUMMIT 2017, Robert M. Lee's - Knowing When to Consume Intelligence and When to Generate It →

H/T

Wisdom, Ignorance of the Crowds

IARPA's doing it, the Neuromongers did it, why not You? Well crafted report on the methodology behind applying the power behind the ignorance and widom of the crowd... Known as the Crowdsourcing Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation (CREATE), IARPA's new program ostensibly may enhance intelligence anlayst's capability levels by leveraging the behavior of crowdsourced resources. Today's Must Read.

Retailers Begin Physical Customer Tracking →

Tracking, that is, with the assistance of Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC), that benevolent arbiter of all things computational... El Reg has conveniently provided a FAQ (direct from the chip fabricator) in their superlatively reported post. Today's Must Read.

iOS Tracking, The Control Gambit →

via Kate Kochetkova writing on the Kaspersky blog, comes advice on mitigating iOS tracking. Well played Ms. Kochetkova, Well Played.

"Unauthorized Code" In Juniper Firewalls, The Decryption Litany →

via the inimitable Dan Goodin and writing at Ars Technica, wherein the good Mr. Goodin, in a display of remarkable restraint, tells the tale of the discovery of code (in this case not 'authorized') making itself at home in Juniper network componentry. In this case, firewall network componentry. Ooops

Threat Intelligence, The Primer

Wang Wei talks threat intelligence at The Hacker News, and provides a primer, thereto.