Inside the News: Cyber, Satellites and the Sovereignty Question

Tom Allen (0:00)

No one wants to hear it, but we have to face facts that, as we've reported several times, and as people have told us, we are at war.

Penny Horwood (0:08)

Yes.

Tom Allen (0:08)

We may not be in a hot war or a physical kinetic war, but cyber war with Russia, we are currently in a state of war. Yeah, I agree. And as most of the West, to be honest.

Welcome back to Inside the News, a very special edition of Ctrl Alt Lead, where Penny and I discuss, analyze, and dissect all the recent important tech news that's been going on in the world. So Penny, we're going to start today with the ASOS attack that happened a couple of weeks ago. What do we know about it?

Penny Horwood (0:45)

Still not exactly a huge amount. So what happened was that lots of basically, thousands and thousands of ASOS customers suddenly got a random alert with an extortion message basically, telling them that the company had been hacked, but it looked like that had been sent to the wrong people. So there was a confirmed compromise of that customer communications channel.

They claimed that they had breached the snowflake environment, but to the best of my knowledge, that still hasn't actually been verified. So which would have been their data environment, but that wasn't verified. But the whole thing went to show the vulnerability of communications, the notification marketing platforms that these retailers are using, because you've literally just got millions of users straight away that you can hit, and they're sitting outside of a company's security jurisdiction. It's a third-party retail issue again.

Tom Allen (1:56)

I did actually see an article a few days later on the BBC that confirmed that personal data had been taken. So that was confirmed. But the initial message that people saw was just like, basically, that the app had been compromised, and communications had been compromised.

So the app became the extortion vector at that point, didn't it?

Penny Horwood (2:18)

Yes. Which was interesting.

Tom Allen (2:21)

I think you make a really good point there about coms with people. Compromising a single piece of software, suddenly with these push notifications, it's not a new problem, but it gives you access to potentially millions of people very, very quickly.

Penny Horwood (2:38)

Yeah, and if your credentials for those third-party platforms have been compromised, then millions of your customers, retail now is so obviously like everything else, retail is digital, is a vital part of retail strategy. So, compromise these kind of retail cloud platforms, and you have access to millions of people very, very easily.

Tom Allen (3:08)

Yeah, absolutely. And let's talk about the attacker as well. We only know them by their name, Xuan Yuan, I mean, that's my best guess. And people have said, it sounds Chinese, probably a Chinese attacker. We have no idea. Like, it could be anyway.

There were attackers from Russia who have used names like the Nigerian Collective before. Like, it's no indication at all of where these people come from. It could be an angry teenager, it could be a nation state or anything in between. We just have no idea. The only thing that we do know is that they have an associated Telegram channel, which is new. And there's an account behind it that previously existed and has been used for video game item trading.

Kind of sort of leans toward the angry teenager side, but people trade Telegram accounts all the time.

Penny Horwood (3:59)

Well, also, and I have also, I also understand from some subsequent reporting that there was this kind of a social, basically someone's credentials got nicked via social engineering, which again, you know, kind of maybe points to more teenage levels of compromise. It's not hard to just ring someone up and pretend to be someone else and get them to hand their credentials over.

Tom Allen (4:21)

No, but also big cyber gangs do that all the time as well. So again, attribution is really, really hard. It's always been hard. It's getting even harder in the age of AI when attackers can all use the same AI chatbots to write code and things. So very, very difficult.

But that wasn't the only retail cyber attack that we saw recently, was it?

Penny Horwood (4:43)

No, it wasn't. So that was followed up in fairly short order by, well, there was scrutiny around H&M. There was some kind of haziness. I'm not quite sure what's happened there. But then there was a confirmed hack a couple of days later on TFG London, which is obviously the UK branch of a big, I think it's an African, South African organization. But they own some quite well-known retail brands, like Whistles and Hobbs. That was obviously similar to ASOS clothes retailer. But then there was the attack on these, which is just so weird, the French fridges.