Pierluigi Paganini March 11, 2022

Lapsus$ Ransomware gang is looking for insiders willing to sell remote access to major technology corporations and ISPs.

Thursday, March 10, Lapsus$ ransomware gang announced they’re starting to recruit insiders employed within major technology giants and ISPs, such companies include Microsoft, Apple, EA Games and IBM. Their scope of interests include – major telecommunications companies such as Claro, Telefonica and AT&T.

Notably, the actors are looking to buy remote VPN access and asking potential insiders to contact them privately via Telegram, they then reward them by paying for the access granted.
Cybersecurity experts agree such activity creates a major insider threat risk and likely will be leveraged more actively by various threat actors on Dark Web.  

“Such tactics were previously used by some cybercriminal and APT groups covertly – when employees of major corporations received similar proposals via Linkedin and or personal e-mails.” – said Christian Lees, CTO of Resecurity, Inc, a Los Angeles-based cybersecurity company providing managed threat detection and response. “Based on our investigation, the group is successful in their activities, and such tactics may generate a new trend in Dark Web for access brokers, especially, in post-pandemic times and increase of geopolitical tensions globally” – he added.

The announcement came right after the publication of stolen data from 2 major technology giants in the face of Nvidia and Samsung – the dumps released as Torrent files contain gigabytes of sensitive documents, digital code-signing certificates and source codes. Hackers have leaked the credentials of more than 71,000 Nvidia employees, source code of NVIDIA’s DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) AI rendering technology, information about six supposed unannounced GPUs, and 190GB of Samsung source codes related to trusted applets in the smartphone TrustZone environment. 

Just recently, Lapsus$ group has published speculative information about the next possible victim company to be released and created a poll on their Telegram channel. As options they offered – 200 GB presumably stolen from Vodafone, databases of Portuguese media corporation Impresa or the source code for MercadoLibre and MercadoPago, both Argentinian e-commerce companies. According to CNN, Vodafone started an internal investigation and is collaborating with law enforcement to clarify the nature of these claims. 

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, ransomware)

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