QuoScient’s Weekly Intelligence Bulletin for the week of 07 February – 14 February 2019 is now available for download in the Media Center!
Find a summary below.
CYBER
Current Threat
Industry Impacted: ANY
Researchers discovered Microsoft .exe files delivered by a malicious Mac installer aimed at evading all built-in Mac OSX protection mechanisms.
Reported Incidents
Industry Impacted: Financials
On 13 February 2019, Bank of Valleta (BoV), the largest financial institution in Malta, was targeted in a cyber attack that resulted in false international transactions amounting to EUR 13 million. According to the reports, the attack originated overseas, with transactions made out to bank accounts in the U.S., the U.K., Czech Republic, and Hong Kong.
Vulnerabilities
Industry Impacted: ANY
Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday release includes fixes for 77 vulnerabilities across multiple, widely used products, with one bug impacted Internet Explorer currently being exploited in the wild. Adobe’s release includes 71 vulnerabilities for Acrobat and Reader, Flash, Cold Fusion and the Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop Application. Researchers announced a new container escape vulnerability in the default container runtime (runC) affecting multiple open source container management systems offered by companies such as RedHat, Google and Amazon. Successful exploitation could allow a malicious container to escalate privileges on the host machine, in order to gain root privilege for code execution of any command.
CRYPTOCURRENCY
The total market capitalization reached EUR 107 billion on 14 February, adding nearly EUR nine billion from the end of last week.
GEOPOLITICS
The fear of espionage stemming from China is largely based on China’s Cybersecurity and National Intelligence Law, which can be interpreted as allowing the Chinese government to require companies to cooperate in intelligence operations.
OUTLOOK
18 February – The Foreign Affairs Council will begin discussions on current affairs, to include happenings in the Ukraine, Syria, Horn of Africa, and Venezuela.