The Register reports that the emergence of hacktivist groups, such as Ukraine IT Army, amid the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine could establish a dangerous paradigm for cyber norms and infrastructure security.
Cyberspace principles established by the U.S., Russia, China, and the U.K. in 2015 have been disregarded since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February and hacktivist activity "is in danger of setting unintended legal and ethical precedents that may create significant political blowback in the future," said journalist and author Kim Zetter, citing Stefan Soesanto of Switzerland's Center for Security Studies, at the Black Hat keynote. Still citing Soesanto, Zetter remarked that the continued existence of hacktivist groups would threaten national security and also increase the vulnerability of civilian infrastructure.
"What if a Russian-owned company located in Germany were to organize an offensive bug bounty program that targets Ukrainian critical infrastructure, and shares the discovered vulnerabilities with the Russian intelligence community? Would Berlin, Brussels and Washington deem this acceptable behavior by the private sector?" Zetter noted.
Kaspersky tells SC Media that the cybersecurity firm is unaware of victims outside the company and is not attributing the activity to a government or other actor.
Officials, journalists, and activists across Armenia were reported by Access Now, Citizen Lab, Amnesty International, CyberHUB-AM, and independent researcher Ruben Muradyan to have been targeted in at least 12 instances with the NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, Reuters reports.
Intellexa's commercial Predator spyware, which has been used in surveillance operations targeted at European politicians, Meta executives, and journalists, has been deploying its Alien loader to the 'zygote64' Android process to enable more spyware components, according to BleepingComputer.