Kazakhstan to Extradite Russian Hacker to Moscow
A Russian man accused by the United States of trafficking in a hacked database of online credentials will apparently evade American courts after the Russian government said it had succeeded in extraditing him. Russian prosecutors said authorities in Kazakhstan will transfer the man, Nikita Kislitsin, to face charges related to an October 2022 hacking incident…
Canadian Flair Airlines left user data leaking for months
The leak consisted of publicly accessible environment files hosted on the flyflair.com website. Flyflair.com belongs to the Canadian ultra-low-cost carrier Flair Airlines, founded in 2005. According to SimilarWeb, the website attracts 3.2 million monthly visitors. Environment files are commonly used in software development to manage environment-specific settings or sensitive information such as API keys and…
Cyberattackers Hoop NBA Fan Data via Third-Party Vendor
As it moves into the final stretch of its regular season, the National Basketball Association said over the weekend that “an unauthorized third party” netted a database filled with the names and email addresses of fans. The data was housed by a newsletter service that it partners with, the NBA noted in a letter to…
MS SQL servers are getting hacked to deliver ransomware to orgs
Cybercriminals wielding the FARGO (aka Mallox, aka TargetCompany) ransomware are targeting Microsoft SQL (MS SQL) servers, AhnLab’s ASEC analysis team has warned. They haven’t pinpointed how the attackers are getting access to the targeted servers, but noted that typical attacks targeting database servers include brute force and dictionary attacks aimed at ferreting out the passwords…
ALPHV Ransomware Gang Creates Searchable Database With Victim Data
Also known as BlackCat and Noberus, ALPHV emerged in November 2021 as the first ransomware family coded using the Rust programming language. To date, the ALPHV cybergang has compromised more than 100 organizations. Likely tied to the cybercrime group behind the Darkside/Blackmatter ransomware, ALPHV operates under the Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) business model, with their affiliates compromising…
Hacker Claims Major Chinese Citizens’ Data Theft
A sample of 750,000 entries posted online by the hacker showed citizens’ names, mobile phone numbers, national ID numbers, addresses, birthdays and police reports they had filed. AFP and cybersecurity experts have verified some of the citizen data in the sample as authentic, but the scope of the entire database is hard to determine. Advertised…
Google: Hack-for-Hire Groups Present a Potent Threat
The threat associated with nation-state-backed hacking groups has been well-researched and chronicled in recent times, but there’s another, equally dangerous set of adversaries that’s operated comparatively in the shadows for years. These are hack-for-hire groups that specialize in breaking into systems and stealing email and other data as a service. Their clients can be private…
Security Lessons From Protecting Live Events
Live events such as concerts and sports games are generally chock-full of action, both on the field and behind the scenes. IT and security teams managing these venues navigate a complex environment that includes a traditional corporate infrastructure, special equipment required for the event, a large army of suppliers and contractors, and all of the…
12 database security landmines, failures, and mistakes that doom your data
In most enterprise stacks today, the database is where all our secrets wait. It’s part safe house, ready room, and staging ground for the bits that may be intensely personal or extremely valuable. Defending it against all incursions is one of the most important jobs for the database administrators, programmers, and DevOps teams that rely…
Swedish Public Health Agency Says Disease Database Targeted in Cyberattacks
SmiNet was shut down on Thursday, after the agency identified several attempts to gain unauthorized access to the database, but it was restored by Friday night. On Thursday, the Public Health Agency announced that it had shut down the database to prevent hacking attempts, and immediately launched an investigation into the matter. The incident was…
