Cybercriminal Twins Caught After They Forgot to Turn Off Microsoft Teams Recording

The worst part of your iPhone getting stolen may not be the theft itself. Instead, it’s the phishing attacks waged against people in your contacts. New research this week shows that there’s a thriving ecosystem for tools that let criminals unlock iPhones and target the phone numbers they find inside.

Foxconn, the electronics manufacturing giant known for its role in building iPhones, revealed this week that it recently “suffered a cyberattack.” A ransomware group known as Nitrogen, claimed responsibility for the hack and said it had stolen 8 TB of data from the manufacturer. While the theft remains unconfirmed, the fact that Foxconn remains a valuable target is all but inevitable. The skies above the United States-Canada border are about to get a lot more crowded. The Department of Homeland Security and Defense Research and Development Canada plan to run an experiment this fall testing 5G-connected drones for collecting “real-time battlefield intelligence.” In the Strait of Hormuz, meanwhile, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps are successfully blocking the crucial shipping route using a “mosquito fleet” of small boats as US-Israeli combat operations continue to bombard the country. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. Cybercriminal Twins Caught After They Forgot to Turn Off Microsoft Teams Recording A lesson for future criminal hackers and rogue employees: When you—and, say, your twin brother—decide to destroy your employer’s network, remember to first close out the Microsoft Teams meeting in which you were fired, so that it doesn’t record you discussing your acts of vengeance. That lesson has now hopefully been driven home for Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, two hackers who have now pleaded guilty to charges that they destroyed 96 government databases after being fired from their jobs at the federal contractor Opexus. (Muneeb has since tried to recant his guilty plea in handwritten notes to the judge.) Their employer had made the decision to terminate the two 34-year-old brothers after discovering their criminal records, which included multiple hacking and wire fraud charges for crimes as petty as stealing airline miles. The Teams meeting in which the two men were fired lasted only a few minutes. The detailed planning and execution of their revenge campaign, however, lasted hours and was all recorded by the same Teams meeting that they had failed to close—which was transcribed in a court document spotted by Ars Technica . Still on the VPN?” Sohaib is heard saying to his brother, who lived in the same home.

Key points

• Foxconn, the electronics manufacturing giant known for its role in building iPhones, revealed this week that it recently “suffered a cyberattack.” A ransomware group known as Nitrogen, claimed resp…
• While the theft remains unconfirmed, the fact that Foxconn remains a valuable target is all but inevitable.
• The skies above the United States-Canada border are about to get a lot more crowded.
• The Department of Homeland Security and Defense Research and Development Canada plan to run an experiment this fall testing 5G-connected drones for collecting “real-time battlefield intelligence.”…
• Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves.