It’s been more than a month since the SolarWinds breach first started dominating security headlines, and we’re still learning new details about the attacks and the organizations affected. Even as the discussion quiets down, it’s easy to imagine we’ll still be looking back and analyzing the full effects of these incidents in much the same way we talk about other seminal breaches and security events from the past 20 years.

The recent Solarwinds hack is the latest headline grabbing zero day to send shockwaves throughout the information security community. It was a sophisticated supply chain attack that incorporated several forensic countermeasures and impacted a number of large government institutions and private companies.

TL;DR: On January 7, the Detectify security research team found that the .cd top-level domain (TLD) was about to be released for anyone to purchase and claimed it to keep it secure before any bad actors snatched it up. A technical report with full details is available on Detectify Labs. This blog post will discuss the basics of domain takeover.

2020 provided a perfect storm for cybercriminals to extort record amounts from vulnerable businesses. Recent reporting has identified life sciences companies as being particularly attractive to target as they have valuable intellectual property information and have enough funding to pay high ransom demands. The pharmaceutical industry is currently at the top of the most targeted industries for such attacks.

A simple DLL file was the catalyst to the most devastating cyberattack against the United States by nation-state hackers. This cinematic breach demonstrates the formidable potency of DLL hijacking and its ability to dismantle entire organizations with a single infected file. DLL hijacking is a method of injecting malicious code into an application by exploiting the way some Windows applications search and load Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL).

In the aftermath of the notorious SolarWinds breach, occurring in mid-December 2020, a nefarious website was observed on 12 January 2021 and, presumably linked to the threat actors involved in the original supply chain attacks, purports to offer stolen data from four victim companies for sale: Other than the above, no file listings, screenshots or detailed 'proof' have been provided although links to four encrypted archive files, one for each potential victim organization, were uploaded to the popular

In this blog we will explore several ways that Alternate Data Streams (ADS) are abused by attackers to hide files and evade detection, defences based on them (and ways to bypass those defences!) but also how they can be used to help malware evade dynamic analysis.

Cybersecurity may be different based on a person's viewpoint. One may want to simply protect and secure their social media accounts from hackers, and that would be the definition of what cybersecurity is to them. On the other hand, a small business owner may want to protect and secure credit card information gathered from their point-of-sale registers and that is what they define as cybersecurity.