QuoScient’s Weekly Intelligence Bulletin for the week of 2 January – 9 December 2019 is now available! Please contact our sales team at intel@quoscient.io to subscribe today.
Find a summary below.
CYBER
Current Threat Industry Impacted: Financials, Government, Energy, Materials, Health Care, Telecommunication Services
The FBI released a flash notification alerting on unidentified nation-state actor(s) actively exploiting a known vulnerability in Pulse Connect Secure VPN since August 2019. According to the release, the attacker(s) leveraged the vulnerability to gain initial access on networks of entities in the financial and government sector in the US.
Iran-US relations escalated towards conflict after the US killed Qassem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), on 03 January. Retaliatory cyberattacks from Iran are expected by the security community at large, however, the nation-state linked threat actor groups are not known for technically sophisticated attacks. Given Iran’s high motivation and possible cooperation with Russia or China, a cyberattack could potentially leverage the higher capabilities of these countries, or other proxy countries.
11 January – Chancellor Merkel and President Putin to meet in Russia
11 January – Presidential Election in Taiwan
14 January – Microsoft to end support for Windows 7
14 January – NATO’s Military Authority to meet in Chiefs of Defence Session in Brussels, Belgium