North Korea Stole $2 Billion for Weapons Program(August 5, 7, & 8, 2019)
 According to a report from Reuters, a confidential UN report says that North Korea has stolen US $2 billion from banks and cryptocurrency exchanges to fund its weapons of mass destruction program. The report to the U.N. Security Council North Korea sanctions committee calls the attacks “widespread and increasingly sophisticated.”
Read more in:
– www.reuters.com: North Korea took $2 billion in cyberattacks to fund weapons program: U.N. report

Researchers Find Some Back-end Election Systems Are Connected to the Internet

Election security experts have found what they believe to be more than 30 back-end election systems in 10 US states connected to the Internet, some for more than a year. The researchers contacted the jurisdictions and some removed the systems from the Internet, but others did not. Some election officials said their systems were not connected because the vendor had installed the system and the jurisdiction had no oversight in the process.

Read more in:
– www.vice.com: Exclusive: Critical U.S. Election Systems Have Been Left Exposed Online Despite Official Denials

Microsoft Researchers Say Russian Hacking Group is Targeting IoT Devices to Access Corporate Networks

Researchers from Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center say that earlier this year, they detected efforts by a hacking group working on behalf of the Russian government to attack IoT devices at companies in an effort to gain access to the companies’ networks and search for accounts with higher privileges. In some instances, the hackers accessed IoT devices using default manufacturer passwords.

Read more in:
– msrc-blog.microsoft.com: Corporate IoT – a path to intrusion

NSA’s Ghidra Has Been Downloaded More Than Half a Million Times(August 8, 2019)
 The NSA released its Ghidra malware reverse-engineering tool at RSA in March.  Since its release, Ghidra has been downloaded from GitHub more than 500,000 times. Outside developers have been creating new features for Ghidra, and an NSA senior researcher noted that they can now hire people who already know how to use the tool.
Read more in:
– www.axios.com: NSA’s free malware research tool gains traction, 6 months on