Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine is showing no signs of letting up, with skirmishes continuing around Bakhmut and cyberespionage activities on the rise. Claims have been made by Russian officials that they ejected anti-Putin Russian partisans from Belgorod. Meanwhile, hacktivist auxiliaries have shown signs of decline and criminal gangs are reverting to the criminal mean.
As fighting appeared to cease around Russia’s Belgorod region, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited troops on the front line in the eastern Donetsk region. The fighting comes a day after armed fighters from inside Ukraine launched one of the largest cross-border incursions since the start of the war. The Russian governor of Belgorod claims that nine people remain in hospital after the incursion.
According to the Washington Post, Russian officials confirmed on Tuesday that a counterterrorism operation has expelled saboteurs from the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, after militias made up of Russians fighting on Ukraine’s side in the war mounted an attack on a border post and targeted a building of the Federal Security Service.
In the midst of the ongoing conflict, Ireland’s cybersecurity agency has been providing ‘non-lethal aid’ to Ukraine, with the cyber chief stating that the assistance has been given in ‘significant volumes’ and that ‘helping Ukraine helps us better protect the people of Ireland’. Ukraine is also courting the US in its quest for US-made F-16 fighter jets, with US President Joe Biden having given his approval for Kyiv’s pilots to be trained to fly them.
Meanwhile, a relatively unknown advanced persistent threat (APT) group named ‘GoldenJackal’ has been found to be targeting government and diplomatic entities in Asia since 2019 for espionage, according to BleepingComputer. Kimsuky, the North Korean APT group, is also back in action, using a new custom malware called RandomQuery to conduct reconnaissance.
While businesses globally face the threat of cyberattacks, PyPI, the open-source code repository, has been dealing with a malware attack. A controlled outage was used to keep malware attackers from gumming up the works. Businesses are urged to take cybersecurity seriously and ensure their email gateways and end users are not fooled by the ever-increasing number of cyberattack campaigns.
Finally, in the world of ransomware, DomainTools has released its outlook for the most prolific ransomware families, discussing the events that forced them to evolve, the top targeted industries and influences on ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS).
As the conflict between Russia and Ukraine grinds on, cybersecurity efforts are becoming increasingly important to prevent further escalation and protect businesses from the ever-present threat of cyberattacks.