Risky Bulletin: New powers for Dutch intelligence services

0:03Dutch intelligence services will get new powers. A security expert has been arrested in Israel for hacking. The BTS hacker gets a 20-year sentence in South Korea. And an AFD politician in Germany has been linked to a Russian cybercrime hosting service. This is the Risky Bulletin, prepared by Katalin Kempanu and read by me, Claire Aird. Today is the 31st of August and this podcast episode is brought to you by Dropzone AI. In today's top story, the Dutch government plans to overhaul the surveillance powers and operational procedures of its intelligence services. A new bill aims to simplify procedures and improve the agency's operational speed.

0:48If passed, both the AIVD and MIVD won't need prior approval to tap or hack entities designated as foreign adversaries. They'll also have the power to force Dutch companies or citizens to provide data about a target. Anyone who refuses would risk prison sentences. Officials cited the threat of war with Russia and the increasing aggressiveness of countries like China and Iran for the changes. In other news, Italian hacktivist and hacker collective Altistici Inventati has been designated a global terrorist organisation by the US State Department. The government claims the group operates digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and far-left militants.

1:35Altistici currently operates anonymity tools such as encrypted chats or email, web hosting, secure video conferencing and streaming. The US Treasury has also sanctioned the group. Farmer giant McKesson has confirmed a security breach after the Shiny Hunters hacking group listed the company on its leak site. The hackers claim to have stolen hundreds of millions of customer and patient records. McKesson says the hackers took the data from a third-party app used by the company. Hackers exploited a vulnerability in the Cosmos blockchain platform to steal almost$3 million in assets from six cryptocurrency companies.

2:16Cosmos says it's managed to freeze 99 % of the stolen assets pending the completion of investigations. The company has patched the floor exploited in the attacks. Hackers have stolen$8.7 million in crypto from the Moonwell DeFi platform. The attackers manipulated the prices of the platform's Marmo token to fraudulently borrow the assets with no collateral. Moonwell has paused all borrowing while it investigates the attack. This is the company's fourth hack in 12 months. It lost a combined$6.4 million in the previous incidents. Israeli authorities have arrested a local man for hacking hundreds of companies and deploying malware.

3:00The suspect is in his 40s and according to media reports, he worked as a cyber security professional. His hacking campaign was discovered earlier this year by Israeli security firm Prefero. His name has not been released. A Chinese national has been sentenced to 20 years in a South Korean prison for stealing more than$275 million from celebrities. He was the leader of a group that hacked a South Korean telco in 2023 and used the data to access victims' bank accounts. The group's most famous victim was Jungkook, a member of K-pop supergroup BTS. A German politician owns a sanctioned Serbian company that helped a Russian bulletproof hosting provider evade US sanctions.

3:48According to Balkan Insight reporters, Andreas Maul is the owner of Belgrade-based Smart Digital Ideas, which has no employees. The company was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department last November after it took over the IP ranges of a sanctioned entity and transferred them to yet another entity in the UK. Maul was born in Kazakhstan but is now a town councillor for Germany's far-right AFD party. A Nigerian man has been sentenced to nearly eight years in a US prison for laundering more than$3.1 million from online scams. Oluwe Sagan Bayewu's laundering scheme involved buying used cars with stolen funds and shipping them to Nigeria to be resold.

4:34Authorities said the funds were stolen through business email compromises, romance and unemployment insurance fraud scams. The US has extradited two Nigerian men on charges stemming from the sextortion and death of two teens in North Carolina and Mississippi. Adebola Festus Adekunle and Matasiru Afiz Olawale were arrested in Nigeria in 2023. They were part of a larger group that specifically targeted children for extortion. The Israeli government is funding a fake US think tank to publish AI-generated propaganda disguised as neutral research. The Hanover Institute for Public Policy published 124 reports, totaling more than half a million words in just nine days.

5:23Researchers believe the site is trying to manipulate AI chatbots into promoting Israel's perspective on the war in Gaza. Russia's used similar tactics to promote its Ukraine war propaganda. Threat actors are exploiting a vulnerability in the Ruby on Rails framework to steal secrets and credentials from web applications. The bug impacts apps that use active storage, a component that interacts with databases and cloud services. The vulnerability doesn't require authentication and can be exploited against default configurations. The bug is also known as Kinda Rails 2 Shell and was patched in early August.

6:04Security researcher Nightmare Eclipse has released a zero-day in the Kaspersky endpoint security product. Named Hardbreacher, the vulnerability allows attackers to gain admin access over a Windows system. The researcher says the exploit still needs some work to be stable. And finally, security researcher Olivier Laflamme has discovered a wormable vulnerability in Unitree G1 humanoid robots. The bug allows attackers within the robot's Bluetooth range to gain root on the device. The robot can then be used to compromise other robots, spy through their microphones and cameras, and other physical or software attacks.

6:46And that is all for this podcast edition. Today's show was brought to you by our sponsor, Dropzone AI. Buy them at dropzone.ai. Thanks to your company.