The National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, FBI and the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre have released a joint advisory to inform organizations of the tactics, techniques and procedures used by threat actor APT28 to exploit and gain access to Cisco routers.

APT28 deploys malware and performs reconnaissance of routers by exploiting the vulnerability CVE-2017-6742 and using default and weak Simple Network Management Protocol community strings, NSA said Tuesday.

According to the advisory, SNMP works to enable network administrators to configure and track network devices remotely. Threat actors can exploit this to gain access to sensitive network data.

The agencies called on organizations to perform mitigation measures, such as patching devices, avoiding the use of SNMP to prevent unauthorized access of routers, enforcing a strong password policy and using logging tools to record commands executed on network devices.

The advisory states that APT28 is also known as the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) 85th Special Service Center military intelligence unit 26165, STRONTIUM, Fancy Bear, Pawn Storm, Sofacy and the Sednit Gang.

Artificial intelligence tools significantly contributed to the 50 percent rise in global phishing attacks in 2022, according to an annual study released by Zscaler.

The 2023 ThreatLabz Phishing Report, which was published on Tuesday, named the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Canada and Russia as the countries most targeted by the evolving cyberthreat.

Compared to global phishing data in 2021, attacks against the education sector surged 576 percent last year, Zscaler found. The retail and wholesale market, which was the most targeted industry in 2022, showed a 67 percent decline in phishing incidents.

The cloud security firm attributed the overall increase to the growing popularity of the interplanetary file system protocol for data sharing and storage. Hackers are also using ChatGPT and other technologies from the black market to launch more sophisticated attacks, such as the Adversary-in-the-Middle technique for forging or stealing credentials.

Adobe, Binance, Facebook, Microsoft and Netflix were identified as the top brand targets, while education, finance and government were the most vulnerable sectors, Zscaler noted.

The company urged organizations to install cloud-native and proxy-based zero trust architecture to shield themselves from phishing attacks.

Cybersecurity is increasingly becoming a critical protective element in government, industry and society. The Potomac Officers Club is joining the conversation with its 2023 Cyber Summit, to be held on June 8. Register for the event by clicking on the banner above.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has released a report outlining and describing the various parties and phases of the Software Bill of Materials sharing lifecycle.

Seeks to assist users in executing a phase of the SBOM sharing lifecycle, the SBOM Sharing Lifecycle Report helps choose sharing platforms based on resources, effort, subject matter expertise and access to tooling, CISA said Monday.

The document details the Discovery, Access and Transport phases of an SBOM and how an SBOM transitions from the author to the consumer.

The CISA report outlines how potential enrichment activities may be carried out on an SBOM to develop a new product before or after it has been shared and recommends that the SBOM community facilitate SBOM sharing and adoption by considering efforts to make existing and future sharing platforms interoperable with each other.

The agency said the document is intended to help readers understand the current landscape by highlighting results of an SBOM sharing survey gathered through interviews with stakeholders.

It “captures industry efforts to create private sharing solutions and services that can store and transport enrichment data and may use higher sophistication features that are cloud-based or use distributed ledger technologies,” per the executive summary.