Cyberespionage by several intelligence services, some of contracted out. Developments in the cyber underworld. Vulnerabilities reported in CPUs. Some notes on Patch Tuesday.

Reports of a Wide-ranging cyberespionage campaign by China's Ministry of State Security. EvilProxy phishing tool targets executives, and defeats multifactor authentication. Vulnerabilities in CPUs. Yashma ransomware targets a wide range of countries. MacOS threat trends. Is there a Russian attempt to disrupt British elections? Rob Boyce from Accenture checks in from the Blackhat conference. Maria Varmazis talking with Black Hat Aerospace Village's Kaylin Trychon and Steve Luczynski. Ukraine claims to have stopped a Russian spyware campaign. And Patch Tuesday has come and gone, but the vulnerabilities remain–unless, of course, you’ve applied the patches.

For links to all of today's stories check out our CyberWire daily news briefing:

https://thecyberwire.com/newsletters/daily-briefing/12/151

Selected reading.

Chinese hackers targeted at least 17 countries across Asia, Europe and North America (Record)

RedHotel: A Prolific, Chinese State-Sponsored Group Operating at a Global Scale (Recorded Future)

Cloud Account Takeover Campaign Leveraging EvilProxy Targets Top-Level Executives at over 100 Global Organizations (Proofpoint) 

‘Downfall’ vulnerability leaves billions of Intel CPUs at risk  (CyberScoop) 

New Inception attack leaks sensitive data from all AMD Zen CPUs (BleepingComputer)

New Yashma Ransomware Variant Targets Multiple English-Speaking Countries (The Hacker News) 

Suspected Vietnamese hacker targets Chinese, Bulgarian organizations with new ransomware (Record)

Black Hat USA 2023 – Bitdefender macOS Threat Report Reveals Key Dangers for Mac Users (Bitdefender) 

Russia ‘tops list of suspects’ in cyber attack which exposed data of 40m UK voters (The Telegraph)

Electoral Commission hack: Five things you need to know (Computing)

‘Hostile actors’ hacked British voter registry, electoral agency says (Washington Post)

Electoral Commission apologises for security breach involving UK voters’ data (the Guardian) 

Ukraine says it prevented Russian hacking of armed forces combat system (Reuters) 

Ukraine says it thwarted attempt to breach military tablets (Record)

Russian secret services try to penetrate operation planning electronic system of Ukraine's army (Ukrainska Pravda)

Patch Tuesday: Adobe Patches 30 Acrobat, Reader Vulns (SecurityWeek) 

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft (Finally) Patches Exploited Office Zero-Days (SecurityWeek)

Microsoft Releases August 2023 Security Updates (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA)

Fortinet Releases Security Update for FortiOS (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA)

Adobe Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA) 

Patch Tuesday review: August 2023. (CyberWire)

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