The first week of January was a slow one for cybersecurity news but not for criminals. While everyone partied over the holiday period, criminals were busy taking advantage of low staff levels to launch several cyberattacks, which we will hear more of in the coming weeks.
The first week of January also saw acquisitions by Mimecast and SonicWall. Enterprise Times also published a podcast with Eric Billingsley of CloudBees.
CloudBees
At DevOps World, London, CloudBees GM of SaaS, Eric Billingsley talked with Enterprise Times. While the focus was on how CloudBees was going to support cloud-native developers with a new SaaS product, it also covered some future plans. Key among those is to integrate compliance and auditing in the SaaS solution.
FBI
2024 started strong for the FBI with three announcements. Two focused on Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams, and the other looked at transnational crime.
A man in Florida was sentenced for money laundering resulting from a BEC scheme. Over $395,000 in real estate closing proceeds were stolen through a money mule bank account controlled by Pierre Yvelt Almonor. Money was sent to Spain and South Africa while some was used for his own needs.
A Nigerian national, Olusegun Samson Adejorin, was indicted for a $7.5 million BEC scheme involving two charities. By impersonating employees, Adejorin gained access to email accounts that allowed him to request funds be sent from two charities. Credential harvesting allowed him to gain access to email accounts, and he also registered spoofed domain names.
It is five years since the US Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida (Tampa Division) seized the servers and infrastructure of the dark web marketplace xDedic. Since then. It has now given an update about prosecutions from the data it gained.
It has now charged and convicted 19 people with involvement in the buying and selling of PII related to US residents. That data was used for a range of illegal activity. Sentences ranged from 78 months, handed down to three of the accused, to probation for another. There are still five individuals yet to be sentenced.
Mimecast
Mimecast purchased Elevate Security to gain a deeper insight into human behaviours and risk. It noted that 8% of employees cause 80% of security incidents. Not all of those are malicious and not everything requires more end-user training to be foisted upon users. Instead, this is about identifying those who are creating risk and finding ways to help them change their actions.
SonicWall
SonicWall acquired Banyan Security to boost its secure access service edge (SASE) space portfolio. It also sees this acquisition as appealing to customers looking for zero-trust network access (ZTNA).
