The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) today notified Congress of a major information security incident, as required by the Federal Information Security Modernization Act.
This finding is the result of internal and independent third-party reviews of OCC emails and email attachments that were subject to unauthorized access. On February 11, 2025, the OCC learned of unusual interactions between a system administrative account in its office automation environment and OCC user mailboxes. On February 12, the OCC confirmed the activity was unauthorized and immediately activated its incident response protocols which include initiating an independent third-party incident assessment and reporting the incident to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. On February 12, the OCC disabled the compromised administrative accounts and confirmed that the unauthorized access had been terminated. The OCC provided public notice of the incident on February 26.
Dubbed “BlackLock” (aka "El Dorado" or "Eldorado"), the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) outfit has existed since March 2024. In Q4 of last year, it increased its number of data leak posts by a staggering 1,425% quarter-on-quarter. According to independent reporting, a relatively new group has rapidly accelerated attacks and could become the most dominant RaaS group in 2025.
Fortunately, it will not happen due to certain events happening "behind the scenes." As you may know, Christmas and Winter Holidays are the best times for cybercriminals to attack, defraud, and extort victims globally. But in some cases, they may expect unexpected gifts too. Around that time, Resecurity identified a vulnerability present at the Data Leak Site (DLS) of BlackLock in the TOR network - successful exploitation of which allowed our analysts to collect substantial intelligence about their activity outside of the public domain.
You know when you're really jet lagged and really tired and the cogs in your head are just moving that little bit too slow? That's me right now, and the penny has just dropped that a Mailchimp phish has grabbed my credentials, logged into my account and exported the mailing list for this blog. I'm deliberately keeping this post very succinct to ensure the message goes out to my impacted subscribers ASAP, then I'll update the post with more details.
The department notified lawmakers of the episode, which it said was linked to a state-sponsored actor in China.
In a letter informing lawmakers of the episode, the Treasury Department said that it had been notified on Dec. 8 by a third-party software service company, BeyondTrust, that the hacker had obtained a security key that allowed it to remotely gain access to certain Treasury workstations and documents on them
Early last year, a hacker gained access to the internal messaging systems of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and stole details about the design of the company’s A.I. technologies.
The hacker lifted details from discussions in an online forum where employees talked about OpenAI’s latest technologies, according to two people familiar with the incident, but did not get into the systems where the company houses and builds its artificial intelligence.
UPDATE 12/29 - While there is no new alerts regarding the Steam product or risk of downloads, the Discord account remains compromised. I have reports that the account is trying to DM people and either send malware to them impersonating themselves as a developer, or trying to gain sensitive information. Do not engage with this account and absolutely do not click on any links sent.