CISA: Increased cyber threat vigilance needed amid Russia-Ukraine war anniversary

U.S. and European organizations and individuals have been urged by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to bolster their cyber vigilance against Russian cybersecurity threats following the first year of the Russia-Ukraine war, The Hacker News reports. Aside from adopting cybersecurity best practices, organizations and individuals should increase preparedness and employ proactive security measures to withstand the impact of Russia's potential distributed denial-of-service attacks, said CISA. Such an advisory comes after the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine noted that several of Ukraine's government websites have been breached by Russian state-backed hacking operation UAC-0056, also known as Nodaria, Ember Bear, UNC2589, DEV-0586, and TA471, with backdoors that have been planted as early as December 2021. Russian data wiper attacks against Ukraine were noted by Fortinet to be a primary driver of the 53% increase in wiper malware attacks between the third and fourth quarters of 2022. "These new strains are increasingly being picked up by cybercriminal groups and used throughout the growing cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) network," said Fortinet.