Danny Moore

Danny Moore

@moore.bsky.social

Cyber-warfare | PhD from KCL | Author of 'Offensive Cyber Operations' | Security @ Meta

6.4K followers284 following258 posts

These kinds of attacks, which are loud, aggressive, and have limited real-world effects, are basically a form of psychological terrorism. It's much more about fear and pressure than it is casualties.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai@lorenzofb.bsky.social

NEW: Here's what we know, and don't know, about the cyberattacks that have hit water plants across at least 12 states in the U.S. in the last couple of weeks. The wave of attacks, allegedly carried out by Iran's government, are more widespread than previous attacks on critical infrastructure.

That's quite clever of the Iranians if it's intentional. To generate a lethal incident would require long, expensive, risky operations that would likely fail. If you attack this way - loudly and at scale - it doesn't matter that you technically fail. You prove your enemy is vulnerable.

No one is immune. As a side note the auth/trust model for most online services was already vulnerable to social engineering, and AI lowers the barrier to making compelling lures.

Courtney Milan@courtneymilan.com

I think I just barely escaped a shockingly savvy scammer trying to get my bank credentials. First, whoever it was had my actual phone number, my actual bank, and the last 4 digits of my account. They sent a "was this transaction you" message that looked almost identical to the ones my bank sends.

Even though I lived under constant rocket fire, I can't imagine what it must be like to live under the threat of scaled cheap drone warfare. Production scales up to millions-per-year now, this would've been pure fantasy a decade ago.

Ulrike Franke@rikefranke.eu

Ukraine, in the meantime, has been attacked by 6722 drones in the month of April alone.

We'll eventually have better scalable countermeasures to drones, but we're very clearly trending towards heavier reliance on unmanned platforms and there's something genuinely unnerving about it all.

Chatting about this with friends earlier, but I miss the mid 2010s when all of cyber sec was on a flawed but functional Twitter. What I loved most about it was that we intersectdd with journalists, academics, policy makers, lawyers, band anyone else who had skin in the game.

It all imploded in Elon-era X. Many of us do not feel safe or want to endorse X as a platform by lending our voice there. But some folks remained, others went here or even to Mastodon. Some even went to LinkedIn. Trust groups also filled some of the void. But it's just not the same.

One of our biggest issues as a cybersecurity community and industry is that we inflicted dozens of partly overlapping cryptonyms on the world and just expect them to deal with it because we can't.

Danny Palmer@dannypalmer.bsky.social

A interesting read. Always felt a bit odd covering cyber attacks, then writing it was carried out by 'Vengeful Hamster' or 'Creeping Groundhog' or something ...then also having to use a paragraph to detail all the different names different companies call the same group. www.wsj.com/tech/cyber-s...

Still consistently the best cyber-related podcast out there

Catalin Cimpanu@campuscodi.risky.biz

-CoinMarketCap hacked via animated logo -White House rejects NSA & CyberCom nomination -FCC probes US Cyber Trust Mark program -Cyberattack disrupts Russian animal processing industry -Iran hacks Albania's capital Tirana Podcast: risky.biz/RBNEWS441/ Newsletter: news.risky.biz/risky-bullet...

Considering that one of Israel's overt goals for the war is to destabilize the Iranian government, a nation-wide shutdown of public internet access plays well into Israel's hands. And it may not even stop further attacks.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai@lorenzofb.bsky.social

NEW: Iran's government has now admitted it took down the internet in the country, arguing it was to protect against Israeli cyberattacks. I spoke to two Iranians who live abroad and can't communicate with their loved ones back home. "I haven’t heard from them in two days," said @ammir.bsky.social.

My hot take is that it isn't a lack of strategy, Israel has many viable, ambitious strategies. It's a constant failure of political will, unity, and patience to enact a strategy.

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Interesting! In my book, Offensive Cyber Operations, I talk a lot about the convergence of tactical offensive cyber and electronic warfare. The resources, approach and desired outcomes are deeply connected. The UK's move is in line with trends seen elsewhere. Will dive more into it all later.

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The most interesting bit here is that the best Western gov cyber outfits overhauled their operational approach after the mid-10s to focus more on avoiding detection. The era of the "factory ops" was too risky with the rise of threat intel. Harder to reliably spot 2025's Regin, Careto, Flame, etc

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai@lorenzofb.bsky.social

NEW: More than a decade ago, Kaspersky discovered a mysterious "elite" hacking group it called Careto (aka “The Mask”), which then vanished and only resurfaced last year. We can now reveal that the researchers who investigated it were confident that the Spanish government was behind it.

"the technical team's analysis indicates that the attacker's methods and related technical proficiency were relatively low-level." Nothing in the article to explain what makes this "cyber warfare".

Catalin Cimpanu@campuscodi.risky.biz

A threat actor has allegedly breached and disrupted the backend systems of a sci-tech company based out of Guangzhou, China. Chinese officials claimed the hack had a "clear political background and [showed] distinct signs of cyber warfare." www.globaltimes.cn/page/202505/...

Danny Moore reposted

NEW: Hundreds of victims are surfacing across the world from zero-day cyberattacks on SAP, in a campaign that one leading cyber expert is comparing to the vast Chinese government-linked Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon breaches. cyberscoop.com/sap-cyberatt...

cyberscoop.comSAP cyberattack widens, drawing Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon comparisonsHundreds of victims are surfacing across the world from zero-day cyberattacks on Europe’s biggest software manufacturer and company.

Danny Moore reposted

Drama over at X/xAI. Whatever you ask Grok, it pivots to “white genocide” in South Africa. The last panel is what Grok claims was a “verbatim” system prompt that caused the behavior. Jury out. It’s now fixed but they haven’t yet bothered explaining. This, not those AGI fantastical scenarios.

Cybersecurity is built on trust, I can only imagine how CISA staff must be feeling.

Kevin Collier @kevincollier.bsky.social

New: Current CISA employees — picture patriotic, hardworking nerds not used to the spotlight, often with narrow focuses like identifying how hackers break into the industrial control systems that run our water and electric facilities — are sick of Trump's cuts and the politicization of their work.

Danny Moore reposted

I was there. It was meant literally. “JD Work — now on the US NSC — shocked some by warning that the US would take lethal action against malicious actors in commercial cyber operations. Participants who heard [it said] they were unsure if it was meant literally or figuratively”

The Record@therecordmedia.bsky.social

The Pall Mall Process — a diplomatic initiative designed to reform the commercial spyware and hacking market — has added more nations as it confronts an industry that is more complex than ever. https://therecord.media/pall-mall-process-commercial-spyware-hacking-paris-diplomacy

Danny Moore reposted

Why is the headline on all X outage stories about Musk blaming Ukraine for the DDoS? Why aren't media outlets putting the emphasis on the security lapse that allowed script kiddies (or whoever) to launch the attack against X as well as the lack of any evidence that the traffic came from Ukraine IPs?

DDoS attacks frequently use compromised or otherwise co-opted IP addresses. The global distribution helps avoid geofencing defenses. Public high-confidence attribution takes time and effort. So take any quickfire claims with healthy skepticism.

Kevin Collier @kevincollier.bsky.social

Updated with Musk's claim about the apparent DDoS: The IP addresses originated in "the Ukraine area." Besides the geographical ambiguity (isn't Russia in the Ukraine area?), this is also total nonsense. A big DDoS uses hacked devices from around the world. Says nothing about where the attacker is.

Great coverage by @kimzetter.bsky.social. In this ecosystem we need to be doubly suspicious of major claims even if published by reputable sources. Considering the denials it's hard to pin down the truth. That said if things continue we may still see a gradual derisking of Russia by the US.

Kim Zetter@kimzetter.bsky.social

Two stories published Friday reporting that Trump admin had ordered US Cyber Command and CISA to "stand down" on their work to detect/counter Russian cyber threats. But new info has come out to contradict them. I dug into what we know and don't know. www.zetter-zeroday.com/did-trump-ad...

That's genuinely lovely but if we are to establish soft power diplomatic momentum that isn't dependent on the US establishment maybe do it on a network that isn't Elon's X.

Yashar Ali 🐘@yasharali.bsky.social

In an extraordinary display of public support, heads of state, heads of government, and foreign ministers from all over Europe and Canada are posting in support of Ukraine in response to the Oval Office meeting with Trump, Zelenskyy, and Vance.

Madness

The Record@therecordmedia.bsky.social

The secretary of Defense has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions, sources tell Recorded Future News. https://therecord.media/hegseth-orders-cyber-command-stand-down-russia-planning

Meeting my past self: 2025 Danny: "So yeah that's when DOGE Big Balls took over the gov database" 2015 Danny: "oh no" 2025 Danny: "don't worry we can still buy Melania coin" 2015 Danny: "please stop, what happened to you" 2025 Danny: "to all of us past Danny, to all of us"

Graham Cluley@grahamcluley.com

DOGE staffer Edward "Big Balls" Coristine is a teenager who worked at startup that hired convicted hackers. Has access to sensitive US government systems. Definitely nothing to be concerned about. www.wired.com/story/edward...

crawl_depth=5

Jason Koebler@jasonkoebler.bsky.social

A web developer has created and released an infinitely generating "tar pit" designed to trap AI training bots in an endless maze: "Just me unleashing shear unadulterated rage at how things are going" www.404media.co/developer-cr...

Yeah, I really don't need the Nazi-account-empowering, Nazi-party-supporting, Nazi-conspiracy-espousing, Nazi-salute-making guy to actually say "gosh I'm a Nazi"

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This and also - we never signed up for social media as this grand attempt at societal discourse. We wanted to reach out with our ideas and content, find connections that we otherwise wouldn't, and consume content we find interesting. We don't owe troll engagement as a mandatory tax.

Ulrike Franke@rikefranke.eu

I haven’t participated in the whole Bluesky-talks-about-itself discussion as I am not interested in navel gazing but I so massively disagree with this, I feel compelled to respond. My Bsky isn’t some nice cloud, it’s pretty much what Twitter was before it stopped working.

I left Twitter because - 1) It actively boosted people who hate me (and others) simply for existing 2) It no longer held its original upsides on connections and content

Side note - I'm glad that the Twitter exodus happened but sad that it took the US election to do it. Twitter actively and aggressively turned against Jews in virulent, violent ways way before and barely anyone cared.

I like this and will add one bit - LLM outputs must be verified, always. Follow sources, double-check claims, scrutinize cited data. LLMs create an information bootstrap, but their fundamental limitations mean they may use their training data to fabricate or modify facts.

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Telecoms are golden targets. Poorly defended, they give adversaries access to metadata, geolocation, content, ISP customers & infra, and billing personal info for millions of people, including sensitive targets. Of COURSE they're top on the list for many groups.

Cyber ops, criminal or state-backed, often take the path of least resistance. Good security controls & practices force adversaries to take riskier and costlier approaches, or seek other targets. That's good! Especially if you're an incidental target rather than high on someone's shitlist.

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The United States is already one of the most globally aggressive, methodical, and pervasive threat actors in cyber.

Ciaran Martin@ciaranm.bsky.social

The addition of capital letters means it’ll definitely work this time 🙄 (Honestly God knows where these ideas come from that: (A) the US has been only on defense; or (B) there’s some sort of magical cost waiting for us to impose that’ll change everything but we’ve just been too cowardly to use)

I'm on board, I always hated that term. It's weirdly violent/graphic, does nothing to describe the type of scam, and portrays victims poorly.

Lily Hay Newman@lhn.bsky.social

Interpol says that it has stopped using the term “pig butchering” and encourages everyone to do the same, because the phrase adds to stigma/shame for victims @mattburgess1.bsky.social and I kept hearing from researchers and tech cos that they were worried about the term www.wired.com/story/interp...