By Eric Talmadge, Associated Press With the dust now settling after “WannaCry”, the biggest ransomware attack in history, cybersecurity experts are taking a deep dive into how it was carried out, what can be done to protect computers from future breaches and, trickiest of all, who is really to blame. For many, it seems that last question has already been solved: It was North Korea. But beyond the frequently used shorthand that North Korea was likely behind the attack lies a more complicated — and enlightening — story: the rise of an infamous group of workaholic hackers, collectively known as…
Five Reasons Why Operation Blockbuster Matters
On Wednesday February 24th Novetta released Operation Blockbuster, a report that describes how a Novetta-led coalition of private industry partners Novetta’s Threat Research & Interdiction Group (TRIG), identified and interdicted the adversary behind the Sony Pictures attack. This effort is the culmination of more than a year of research and reverse engineering by many skilled professionals with the goal of devising ways to disrupt the tools and techniques of the threat actor group to collectively protect our customers. If you haven’t yet seen this report, there’s a friendly two-page executive summary at http://www.operationblockbuster.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Operation-Blockbuster-Ex-Summary.pdf and the full report is at http://www.operationblockbuster.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Operation-Blockbuster-Report.pdf….
The Sony Hackers Were Causing Mayhem Years Before They Hit the Company
Sony Hackers Behind Previous Cyberattacks Tied to North Korea
The hackers that took down Sony Pictures are still on the attack, researchers say
Sony Pictures linked to breaches in China, India, Japan-report
These Are the Cyberweapons Used to Hack Sony
Operation Blockbuster: Unraveling the Long Thread of the Sony Attack
Operation Blockbuster is a Novetta-led coalition of industry partners created to identify and disrupt the malicious tools associated with the threat actor behind the November 2014 Sony Pictures attack. We began researching last year by identifying several malware hashes publicized by the security community following the SPE attack. From these hashes, we were able to establish a baseline of the malware capabilities, as there were common code and libraries being used in the malware samples. From these common snippets of code and use of library functions, signatures were generated to detect additional malware samples using both proprietary tools and Totem,…
