“We understand the importance of these tools in our operations and are actively exploring alternative tools to ensure minimal disruption,” said the April 16-dated notification sent to more than 500 CISA cyber threat hunters. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called for reviewing CISA’s spending, stating: “CISA needs to be much more effective, smaller, more nimble, to really fulfill their mission, which is to hunt and to help harden our nation’s critical infrastructure,” adding that it should refocus away from addressing mis- and dis-information online. Hundreds of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) staff were notified this week that the organization is discontinuing critical cybersecurity tools used for threat hunting operations. Amid broader reductions across the cyber defense agency, CISA’s threat hunting division plans to cease use of Google-owned VirusTotal on April 20. These contractors supported CISA’s threat hunting operations, which proactively search for indicators of compromise (IOCs) across civilian federal networks. Cyber Security News is a Dedicated News Platform For Cyber News, Cyber Attack News, Hacking News & Vulnerability Analysis. Threat hunters rely on its API for automated malware detection through code like with virustotal_python.Virustotal(“<API_KEY>”) as vtotal: to rapidly analyze suspicious binaries. For threat hunters, these centralized tools accelerate the initial triage of potential threats, enabling rapid prioritization of incidents.
This Cyber News was published on cybersecuritynews.com. Publication date: Tue, 22 Apr 2025 10:25:10 +0000