The BlackCat ransomware group, aka ALPHV, has claimed responsibility for the recent cyberattack on Swissport that caused flight delays and service disruptions. The €3 billion revenue firm, Swissport, has a presence across 310 airports in 50 countries and provides cargo handling, maintenance, cleaning, and lounge hospitality services. Tuesday, BlackCat (ALPHV) ransomware group posted a small set of sample files that the group claims to have obtained from Swissport. The threat actor has announced they are willing to sell the entire 1.6 TB "data dump" to a prospective buyer.   Read more about it here.

Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine has been met with fierce resistance throughout the country’s towns and cities. As Russian forces have moved closer to Kyiv, lawyers, students, and actors have taken up arms to defend their country from invasion. They are not the only ones: Volunteers have also flocked to join a Ukrainian volunteer “IT Army” that’s fighting back online. At around 9 pm local time on February 26, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and minister for digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, announced the creation of the volunteer cyber army. Read more about it here.

The Ministry of Defense and the Armed Forces of Ukraine and state-owned banks, Privatbank (Ukraine’s largest bank) and Oschadbank were hit by Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. While the website of the Oschadbank bank initially remained accessible, the customers were not able to access their online banking accounts. At the time of this writing, the website of the financial institution is not reachable.   Read more about it here.

Viasat said Monday that it believes “a cyber event” disrupted its satelliteinternet service in Ukraine, with an ongoing outage under investigation. “Viasat is experiencing a partial network outage — impacting internet service for fixed broadband customers in Ukraine and elsewhere on our European KA-SAT network,” the California-based company said in a statement to CNBC The outage began on Feb. 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, according to the company, which said it notified “law enforcement and government partners,” adding it has “no indication that customer data is involved.” Read more about it here.

The French national data protection authority, CNIL, issued a formal notice to managers of an unnamed local website today arguing that its use of Google Analytics is in violation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, following a similar decision by Austria last month. The root of the issue stems from the website’s use of Google Analytics, which functions as a tool for managers to track content performance and page visits. CNIL said the tool’s use and transfer of personal data to the U.S. fails to abide by landmark European regulations because the U.S. was deemed to not have equivalent privacy protections.   Read more about it here. 

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned US organizations that data wiping attacks targeting Ukraine could spill over to targets from other countries. The two federal agencies issued this warning in the form of a joint cybersecurity advisory published over the weekend following the Although the two malware strains have only been deployed against Ukrainian networks so far, the threat actors deploying them could also accidentally hit other targets, and US organizations should be ready to prevent such devastating attacks. * Read more about it here.

The German government said on Tuesday that a Chinese cyberespionage group known as APT27 has repeatedly attacked German companies over the past few months using vulnerabilities in software like Microsoft Exchange and Zoho SelfService. The attacks, which have been taking place since at least March 2021, have aimed to install a version of the HyperBro malware inside corporate networks for the purpose of intelligence collection from infected hosts, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) said in a press release.  

A large-scale ransomware attack has disrupted operations at oil terminals in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. This massive attack crippled IT systems affecting dozens of terminals affecting oil storage and transport around the world, including Oiltanking in Germany, SEAInvest in Belgium and Evos in the Netherlands. This cyberattack has also resulted in difficulty loading and unloading refined product cargoes at six oil storage terminals in the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp refining hub, according to news reports. Read more about it here.

Airport services giant Swissport is restoring its IT systems after a ransomware attack struck late last week, delaying flights. The Zurich-headquartered firm operates everything from check-in gates and airport security to baggage handling, aircraft fuelling and de-icing and lounge hospitality. It claims to have provided ground services to 97 million passengers last year and handled over five million tons of air freight. Swissport took to Twitter on Friday to warn its IT infrastructure had been hit by ransomware and apologize for any impact on service delivery.   Read more about it here.

The defacement of multiple Ukrainian government websites last week may have been intended as cover for a destructive malware attack that failed to execute or has yet to be unleashed, some security experts warn. The defacements occurred Thursday night and Friday morning - local time in Ukraine - as approximately 100,000 Russian troops remained massed on the country's border. On Saturday, Microsoft reported that it had found multiple attempts to infect Ukrainian government sites with a type of destructive malware it had never seen before, and that the first attack attempts appear to have begun Thursday.   Read more about it here.