Latest cybersecurity reporting from selected sources.

Gartner sees accelerating growth in IT spending, powered by cloud and AI infrastructure investment A day after the International Energy Agency (IEA) said the US/Israel/Iran war was creating the worst energy crisis ever faced by the ‌world, Gartner increased its growth forecasts for global IT spending by nearly three percentage points.…

A financially motivated data theft and extortion group is attempting to inject itself into the Iran war, unleashing a worm that spreads through poorly secured cloud services and wipes data on infected systems that use Iran's time zone or have Farsi set as the default language.

Nation-State Hackers Sheltering From Bombs or Cut Off From InternetIranian cyber proxies are girding for revenge while nation-state hackers in Tehran have gone quiet, whether to shelter from an onslaught of missile attacks or because the Middle Eastern country remains disconnected from the global internet on the third day of a U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign.

The internet never stays quiet. Every week, new hacks, scams, and security problems show up somewhere

PLUS: Exercise app tells spies to stop mapping; GitLab scan reveals 17,000 secrets; Leak exposes Iran’s Charming Kitten; and more! Infosec In Brief Switzerland’s Conference of Data Protection Officers, Privatim, last week issued a resolution calling on Swiss public bodies to avoid using hyperscale clouds and SaaS services due to security concerns.…

Despite loathing the USA, Iran wants providers who match NIST’s definition of cloud computing The Information Technology Organization of Iran (ITOI), the government body that develops and implements IT services for the country, is looking for suppliers of cloud computing.…

The Iranian state-backed hacking outfit called APT42 is making use of enhanced social engineering schemes to infiltrate target networks and cloud environments

The Iranian state-backed threat actor tracked as APT42 is employing social engineering attacks, including posing as journalists, to breach corporate networks and cloud environments of Western and Middle Eastern targets. [...]

Mandiant Says APT42 Members Have Been Posing as Journalists to Steal Troves of DataMembers of the Iranian state hacking group APT42 have been observed posing as journalists from credible news outlets and well-known research institutions as part of a global effort to harvest credentials and hack into victim cloud networks, according to a Mandiant report published Wednesday.

The Iranian nation-state actor known as TA453 has been linked to a new set of spear-phishing attacks that infect both Windows and macOS operating systems with malware

The Iranian nation-state group known as MuddyWater has been observed carrying out destructive attacks on hybrid environments under the guise of a ransomware operation