Georgetown has a new report on the highly secretive bulk surveillance activities of ICE in the US:

When you think about government surveillance in the United States, you likely think of the National Security Agency or the FBI. You might even think of a powerful police agency, such as the New York Police Department. But unless you or someone you love has been targeted for deportation, you probably don’t immediately think of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

This report argues that you should. Our two-year investigation, including hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and a comprehensive review of ICE’s contracting and procurement records, reveals that ICE now operates as a domestic surveillance agency. Since its founding in 2003, ICE has not only been building its own capacity to use surveillance to carry out deportations but has also played a key role in the federal government’s larger push to amass as much information as possible about all of our lives. By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time. In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has — without any judicial, legislative or public oversight — reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S., whose records can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.

ICE has built its dragnet surveillance system by crossing legal and ethical lines, leveraging the trust that people place in state agencies and essential service providers, and exploiting the vulnerability of people who volunteer their information to reunite with their families. Despite the incredible scope and evident civil rights implications of ICE’s surveillance practices, the agency has managed to shroud those practices in near-total secrecy, evading enforcement of even the handful of laws and policies that could be invoked to impose limitations. Federal and state lawmakers, for the most part, have yet to confront this reality.

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The joint advisory is designed to enable transparent discussions between MSPs and their customers on securing sensitive data

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Malware researchers warn about a stealthy backdoor program that has been used by a Chinese threat actor to compromise Linux servers at government and private organizations around the world. While the backdoor is not new and variants have been in use for the past five years, it has managed to fly under the radar and have very low detection rates. One reason for its success is that it leverages a feature called the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) on Unix-based systems to hide malicious traffic.

BPFdoor was named by researchers from PwC Threat Intelligence who attribute it to a Chinese group they call Red Menshen. The PwC team found the threat while investigating several intrusions throughout Asia last year and included a short section about it in their annual threat report released late last month

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Researchers at cybersecurity vendor Proofpoint have analyzed a new remote access Trojan (RAT) malware campaign using sophisticated evasion techniques and leveraging COVID-19 themed messaging to target global organizations. The malware, dubbed “Nerbian RAT” and written in the Go programming language, uses significant anti-analysis and anti-reversing capabilities and open-source Go libraries to conduct malicious activities, the researchers stated.

The campaign was first analyzed by Proofpoint in late April and disproportionately impacts entities in Italy, Spain and the UK. In a statement, Proofpoint Vice President Threat Research and Detection Sherrod DeGrippo said the research demonstrates how malware authors continue to operate at the intersection of open-source capability and criminal opportunity.

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