From nation-state threat actors to typical cybercriminals, the public sector faces a multitude of cybersecurity threats. At the same time, public-sector organizations struggle to maintain a robust cyber hygiene posture because they need to balance limited budgets with complex IT environments and highly interconnected ecosystems.

When an unfortunate event occurs, people tend to be curious about who was responsible for the event. It can be interesting and helpful to know who your enemy is and what their motives might be. But in cybersecurity, the primary focus is ultimately on preventative and detective measures to avoid similar issues. Let’s use a recent example to illustrate this point below.

Reuters reported on Friday that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and local police launched a series of raids against members of the REvil/Sodinokibi ransomware gang at the request of the United States. More than a dozen arrests were made with millions in cash and goods being confiscated by authorities. This unprecedented action from the Russian Federal Security Service aligns with the fear that we've observed while conducting cybercriminal chatter reconnaissance on the Dark Web.

A notorious cybercrime gang, involved in a series of high profile ransomware attacks, has in recent months been sending out poisoned USB devices to US organisations. As The Record reports, the FBI has warned that FIN7 – the well-organised cybercrime group believed to behind the Darkside and BlackMatter ransomware operations – has been mailing out malicious USB sticks in the hope that workers will plug them into their computers.

In the early days of 2022, two extremely popular JavaScript open source packages, colors.js, and faker.js, were modified to the point of being unusable. The reason for this event can be traced to various motivations, but what is worth mentioning is that several applications that employed those dependencies were involved. The two impacted packages can be used for different purposes in JavaScript applications. colors.js enables color and style customization in the node.js console.

Many of us are fond of collecting things, but not everyone is excited about Collections #1-5. In 2019, these Collections, composed of ca. 932 GB of data containing billions of email addresses and their passwords, made their way around the Internet. These collections weren’t breaches but compilations of emails and passwords that had been gathered. Even after repeat entries were whittled down, the collection still contained billions of distinct address and password combinations.