@BushidoToken Threat Intel

  Introduction A Chinese Ministry of Public Security (MPS) contractor called  iSOON (also known as Anxun Information) that  specializes in network penetration research and related services has had its data leaked to GitHub. Based on the level of detail, leaked chat logs, amount of data, and corroboration from overlaps indicators of compromise (IOCs), there is a high level of confidence it is legit. Preliminary findings from less than one week since the leak revealed that it contains unprecedented insights into how the Chinese MPS operates by using Chinese commercial surveillance vendors and what their technical capabilities are. The Chinese MPS is China’s internal security service that primarily focuses on  internal and border security, counter-terrorism, surveillance. The MPS is comparable to the  Russian FSB, the US DHS or the UK’s MI5. The most interesting findings have come from iSOON’s product whitepapers and confidential slide deck presentations given to t...

The title of this blog is a homage to the film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and presents the fact that video games and cheating is also tied to hacking and spying. It is a common trope in cybersecurity that professionals first became interested in the field through an encounter while playing games.  Speaking personally, I first became enthralled with hacking in 2008 by matching against some modders using hacked weapons while playing  Halo 3   (my favourite game of all time). This blog aims to highlight why monitoring the video game industry is important for cyber threat intelligence analysts hunting down the latest threats. Video games and hacking are very intertwined. Many hackers start out by creating cheats for games, and have to play the games to begin with to learn how to hack them.  There are also several notable incidents whereby hacking in video games escalated to become critical issues for the software development industry and enterprise security realms. T...