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Uyghur American Association Targeted with Lookalike Website
Likely a Chinese APT Targeting English-speaking Uyghurs Living in the United States Nisos researchers identified a domain, UighurWorld[.]com, targeting the Uyghur American Association (UAA), which represents the Uyghur population in the United States....
In Democracy We Trust
In July 2020, enterprising PhD candidates and a Johns Hopkins professor began aggregating predictions of unrest in the United States into a site unsubtly titled “anewcivilwar.com”. At the time, it could have been easy to dismiss the effort as a cherry-picked exercise...
Steps for External and Internal Threat Hunting in the Aftermath of SolarWinds
The holiday season is full of joy, anticipation, and the latest technology breach news. With this being 2020, the technology industry, not wanting to be outdone by forest fires, plagues, and murder hornets, came out with its own version of a ‘natural disaster’; an...
White Supremacist Movements Are Exploding
Has Your Company Assessed the Possible Risk to Its Brand and Leadership? Violent white supremacist movements have been undergoing a strong resurgence since 2013. Does your company have eyes on this emerging threat? If not, Nisos has the experience and proprietary...
Actioning Cyber Threat Intelligence for Cloud-based Enterprise
Today, many companies are primarily cloud-based with little on-premise infrastructure. These organizations often have minimal internal network traffic and may even have limited email usage. In these environments, the risk of developer misconfigurations and inadvertent...
How to Successfully Implement a Threat Intelligence Program
Threats continue to occur on a global scale. They are large, they are complex, and they are growing. This problem has led to widespread interest in tailoring intelligence programs that provide insight into business problems and generate actionable outcomes.For...
Weaponization for Disinformation
Continuing our series on the adversarial mindset, we focus on how actors weaponize narratives for disinformation operations. In a previous blog post, we wrote about the reconnaissance steps that disinformation actors take prior to launching their operations, including...
What is Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior?
Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) is a common phrase heard in the news regarding disinformation, misinformation, and influence operations; but what exactly does it mean?First, let’s define our terms: inauthentic behavior, and coordinated. Inauthentic behavior in...
Weaponization for Cyber-Enabled Fraud
In our previous blog, we highlighted how fraudsters conduct reconnaissance for fraud activities. While banking malware, trojans, worms, and botnets such as Zeus Panda, Ramnit and Trickbot have typically been used to infect consumer PCs in order to collect personal...
Weaponizing Tools for Computer Network Operations
Continuing in our series on the adversarial mindset, we focus on weaponization for computer network operations. Following the reconnaissance phase and identifying a target, an actor needs to gain a foothold in a network before determining how to monetize the access or...
How Adversaries Conduct Reconnaissance for Disinformation Operations
Building on our series exploring the adversarial mindset, disinformation actors seek amplification of their content, regardless of whether their goal is financial, ideological, or political. Disinformation actors need venues to post their content that will be most...
An Introduction to Honeypots
In our latest blog series, we discuss how threat intelligence can be applied smarter for medium sized organizations with limited resources. We discuss ways to proactively detect threats beyond subscribing to information feeds that require a lot of resources to...
Using Selectors For Open Source Intelligence
A “selector” is not a generally defined term in enterprise security, but selectors are important for understanding open source intelligence and investigations in the digital realm. Building on our previous technical blog defining a selector, we will be diving deeper...
How Adversaries Conduct Reconnaissance for Fraud Operations
Building on our series on the adversarial mindset, fraudsters will identify a target based on the ease and speed with which they are able to monetize their fraudulent activities. Many of the reconnaissance steps involve a threat actor learning how a company conducts...
Making Threat Intelligence Useful for Medium-Sized Enterprises
Medium-sized enterprises that don’t have sophisticated security operations teams typically focus on the basic blocking and tackling of information security: policies around financial controls, incident response plans, data retention policies, disaster recovery around...
How Adversaries Conduct Reconnaissance For Computer Network Operations
The adversarial mindset is the core that allows us to provide a world-class intelligence capability tailored to the needs of business. Many people ask what it means to have the adversarial mindset and how that differentiates Nisos. While it’s a complicated answer...
Six Considerations for Building a Cyber Threat Intelligence Program
When evaluating cyber threat intelligence programs for enterprise, organizations should consider six critical topics before spending on data. It’s natural for an organization to start from one of two places: where they have already been beaten badly enough they need...
The Myth of Complex Passwords
Password reuse is one of the most pervasive security concerns for information security teams in enterprise. It’s an easy way for an adversary to gain initial access if two factor authentication is not properly implemented and more importantly, provides the ability to...
Three Steps to Use Threat Intelligence, Red Team, and Blue Team Collaboration to Improve Security
For many medium and large organizations, a penetration test that results in a “data breach” is going to lead to numerous findings that take months and sometimes years to remediate. In that timeframe, after operating systems are upgraded across non-production and...
What is a Selector in the World of Digital Crime?
Every hour of every day, criminals, nation states, and fraudsters around the world commit attacks using phone numbers, email addresses, and social media handles. We call these “selectors,” i.e. the technical attributes of an online entity. On the other side of the...
Avoiding Ransomware
Many maturing security operations centers within medium and large enterprises will indicate that ransomware is often the biggest “threat” that keeps them up at night. Ransomware is not a threat; it is a capability criminals use with an intent of monetizing illegal...
Podcast Platitudes
Cybersecurity is an ever-evolving industry tackling some really challenging problems. Here at Nisos we truly feel that it is necessary to learn from the best at every opportunity, and we try to ensure that all of the material we present makes its consumers better at...
What Is Digital Identity Reduction and Why Does It Matter?
The amount of information openly available on the internet about any given individual is staggering.More and more, privacy and online security are brought into the limelight and people are becoming more protective of their online presence. We urge our family, friends,...
Four Future Trends of Disinformation Campaigns
While disinformation has played a powerful role in the geopolitical world over the last four years, enterprise is increasingly needing to be prepared to address numerous types of disinformation as well. Much of the discourse on ‘fake news’ these days conflates three...
Three Ways to Improve Return on Investment for Threat Intelligence
If a corporate threat intelligence program is merely focusing on indicators of compromise delivered to a security operations function, they should consider expanding their reach throughout the organization. Mature and maturing security programs spend significant time...
Hacker Diplomacy: How to Minimize Business Risks Stemming from Vulnerability Disclosures
In the new Work-From-Home world where non-essential companies have pivoted into a remote workforce model with increasing reliance on business tools that ensure connectivity, there is a growing concern that tools like Zoom may not be vetted to the full extent of their...
How to Use Breach Credentials to Support Intelligence Collection and Attribution
While some organizations may view third party breach usernames and passwords as important indicators to prevent unauthorized access to their own networks, larger organizations are using two factor authentication for securing their perimeters by locking down...
Steps for Medium Sized Businesses to Address Cyber Supply Chain Risk
Any business operating on the internet with internet accessible services provides an opening for anyone else on the internet - good, bad, or indifferent - to interrogate those services and see what’s running. Bad actors and security companies are always actively...
Five Critical Data Source Considerations for Adversary Attribution
Strong intelligence is the base of adversary attribution; nothing can replace the holistic picture created by technical indicators in combination with HUMINT and OSINT sources. While many cyber threat intelligence teams focus on technical events and indicators that...
Translating Cyber Threat Intelligence for the Rest of the Business
For enterprise businesses, especially in the technology, finance, and manufacturing sectors, the use cases and company consumers of intelligence work can be almost limitless. Therefore, it’s critical for a threat intelligence team to be transparent throughout the...
Five Critical Data Source Considerations for External Threat Hunting
Strong intelligence starts with good sources and when it comes to gaining the most context around suspicious events or adversaries of interest, nothing beats external hunting.Most current threat hunting is rightfully focused on hunting inside the firewalls of an...
Three Types of Disinformation Campaigns that Target Corporations
In 2018, The Washington Post named “misinformation” its “word of the year.” In 2019, NPR labelled “disinformation” the same. Then 2020 happened. Many of the disinformation actors taking advantage of the combination of a global pandemic and major US political cycle are...
Using Threat Intelligence to Counter Platform Abuse
Companies whose products serve as collaboration platforms play a key role in our increasingly cloud native and remote work environment. The technology allows companies to achieve clear business opportunities, but also cause unique security challenges. Not only must...
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