Articoli

The path to parenthood looks different for everyone, but one element of becoming a parent is universal: the need for quality healthcare and community support. Sadly, this basic need is out of reach for far too many people. Every day, more than 800 people around the world die from pregnancy- and childbirth-related causes that could have been prevented, according to the World Health Organization.

Google Registry launched the .day top-level domain earlier this year, and today we’re introducing mothers.day — a resource dedicated to highlighting inequities in maternal health and helping families at different stages of parenthood. The website also lists ways you and your loved ones can help bridge these gaps by volunteering or donating to organizations making an impact in this space.

This year, I’ve asked my family to make giving to others the focus of our Mother’s Day celebration. To help pass on the value of generosity, the mothers.day website points to several nonprofits for Mother’s Day giving, including:

• Postpartum Support International is the world’s leading nonprofit organization dedicated to helping women suffering from perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, including postpartum depression.
• Black Mamas Matter Alliance is a Black women-led group that advocates, drives research, builds power, and shifts culture for Black maternal health, rights and justice.
• Fistula Foundation provides life-transforming surgery to women injured in childbirth who are left incontinent and often shunned.
• The Cradle is a nonprofit, licensed child welfare agency providing adoption services, counseling and education and a nursery for birth parents and adoptive families.
• Hello Neighbor’s Smart Start program provides refugee and immigrant mothers with socio-emotional, logistical, and material need support throughout pregnancy and postpartum.

These are just a few organizations committed to making the journey to parenthood equitable for everyone. In addition to giving, mothers.day includes information on how you can make an impact on maternal healthcare by participating in research studies:

• Powermom is a mobile research platform with the goal of addressing health disparities and partnering with all participants during pregnancy and the postpartum period.
• PM³ study is a study for Black women, by Black women and helps new moms in the state of Georgia stay healthy after pregnancy.
• Maternal Near Miss aims to gather insights from women of color who’ve had near-death experiences during pregnancy and/or childbirth in order to inform maternal health policies and clinical practices.

There are so many ways to support birthing people and their families around the world. For more ways to get involved, visit mothers.day.

Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been closely monitoring the cybersecurity activity in Eastern Europe with regard to the war in Ukraine. Since our last update, TAG has observed a continuously growing number of threat actors using the war as a lure in phishing and malware campaigns. Similar to other reports, we have also observed threat actors increasingly target critical infrastructure entities including oil and gas, telecommunications and manufacturing.

Government-backed actors from China, Iran, North Korea and Russia, as well as various unattributed groups, have used various Ukraine war-related themes in an effort to get targets to open malicious emails or click malicious links. Financially motivated and criminal actors are also using current events as a means for targeting users.

As always, we continue to publish details surrounding the actions we take against coordinated influence operations in our quarterly TAG bulletin. We promptly identify and remove any such content but have not observed any significant shifts from the normal levels of activity that occur in the region.

Here is a deeper look at the campaign activity TAG has observed and the actions the team has taken to protect our users over the past few weeks:

APT28 or Fancy Bear, a threat actor attributed to Russia GRU, was observed targeting users in Ukraine with a new variant of malware. The malware, distributed via email attachments inside of password protected zip files (ua_report.zip), is a .Net executable that when executed steals cookies and saved passwords from Chrome, Edge and Firefox browsers. The data is then exfiltrated via email to a compromised email account.

Malware samples:

• 710faabf217a5cd3431670558603a45edb1e01970f2a8710514c2cc3dd8c2424
• 39d242660c6d5dbe97d5725bbfed0f583344d18840ccd902fffdd71af12e20ec

TAG would like to thank the Yahoo! Paranoids Advanced Cyber Threats Team for their collaboration in this investigation.

Turla, a group TAG attributes to Russia FSB, continues to run campaigns against the Baltics, targeting defense and cybersecurity organizations in the region. Similar to recently observed activity, these campaigns were sent via email and contained a unique link per target that led to a DOCX file hosted on attacker controlled infrastructure. When opened, the DOCX file would attempt to download a unique PNG file from the same attacker controlled domain.

Recently observed Turla domains:

• wkoinfo.webredirect[.]org
• jadlactnato.webredirect[.]org

COLDRIVER, a Russian-based threat actor sometimes referred to as Callisto, continues to use Gmail accounts to send credential phishing emails to a variety of Google and non-Google accounts. The targets include government and defense officials, politicians, NGOs and think tanks, and journalists. The group’s tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) for these campaigns have shifted slightly from including phishing links directly in the email, to also linking to PDFs and/or DOCs hosted on Google Drive and Microsoft One Drive. Within these files is a link to an attacker controlled phishing domain.

These phishing domains have been blocked through Google Safe Browsing – a service that identifies unsafe websites across the web and notifies users and website owners of potential harm.

Recently observed COLDRIVER credential phishing domains:

• cache-dns[.]com
• docs-shared[.]com
• documents-forwarding[.]com
• documents-preview[.]com
• protection-link[.]online
• webresources[.]live

Ghostwriter, a Belarusian threat actor, has remained active during the course of the war and recently resumed targeting of Gmail accounts via credential phishing. This campaign, targeting high risk individuals in Ukraine, contained links leading to compromised websites where the first stage phishing page was hosted. If the user clicked continue, they would be redirected to an attacker controlled site that collected the users credentials. There were no accounts compromised from this campaign and Google will alert all targeted users of these attempts through our monthly government-backed attacker warnings.

Both pages from this campaign are shown below.

In mid-April, TAG detected a Ghostwriter credential phishing campaign targeting Facebook users. The targets, primarily located in Lithuania, were sent links to attacker controlled domains from a domain spoofing the Facebook security team.

Recently observed Ghostwriter credential phishing domains and emails:

• noreply.accountsverify[.]top
• microsoftonline.email-verify[.]top
• lt-microsoftgroup.serure-email[.]online
• facebook.com-validation[.]top
• lt-meta.com-verification[.]top
• lt-facebook.com-verification[.]top
• secure@facebookgroup[.]lt

Curious Gorge, a group TAG attributes to China’s PLA SSF, has remained active against government, military, logistics and manufacturing organizations in Ukraine, Russia and Central Asia. In Russia, long running campaigns against multiple government organizations have continued, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Over the past week, TAG identified additional compromises impacting multiple Russian defense contractors and manufacturers and a Russian logistics company.

Protecting Our Users

Upon discovery, all identified websites and domains were added to Safe Browsing to protect users from further exploitation. We also send all targeted Gmail and Workspace users government-backed attacker alerts notifying them of the activity. We encourage any potential targets to enable Google Account Level Enhanced Safe Browsing and ensure that all devices are updated.

The team continues to work around the clock, focusing on the safety and security of our users and the platforms that help them access and share important information. We’ll continue to take action, identify bad actors and share relevant information with others across industry and governments, with the goal of bringing awareness to these issues, protecting users and preventing future attacks. While we are actively monitoring activity related to Ukraine and Russia, we continue to be just as vigilant in relation to other threat actors globally, to ensure that they do not take advantage of everyone’s focus on this region.