U.K. Officially Blames Russia for NotPetya Attack
The United Kingdom on Thursday officially accused the Russian government of launching the destructive NotPetya attack, which had a significant financial impact on several major companies. British Foreign Office Minister for Cyber Security Lord Tariq Ahmad said the June 2017 NotPetya attack was launched by the Russian military and it “showed a continued disregard for…
NoMoreRansom: Free Decryption for Latest Cryakl Ransomware
Decryption keys for a current version of Cryakl ransomware have been obtained and uploaded to the NoMoreRansom website. Victims of Cryakl can potentially recover encrypted files with the Rakhni Decryptor available for free from Kaspersky Lab or NoMoreRansom. NoMoreRansom is a collaborative public/private project launched by Europol, the Dutch National Police, Kaspersky Lab and McAfee in July 2016….
Crypto Mining Malware Infects Thousands of Websites
Hacked Script Infects Several Government Sites with Cryptominer The websites of numerous government, health and education organizations worldwide were infected with a crypto-currency miner over the weekend, after a script running on all of them was maliciously modified. The culprit was Browsealoud, a script developed by Texthelp to add “speech, reading, and translation to websites.”…
Feels like a Cyber Security Groundhog’s Day
While nobody has a crystal ball for what’s coming this year, I think we can all agree tough security lessons were learned in 2017. From Yahoo indicating that every one of its 3 Billion email accounts (that’s a B) was exposed in a breach to some pretty serious hacking tools believed to have been developed…
Cisco Aware of Attacks Exploiting Critical Firewall Flaw
Cisco informed customers on Wednesday that it has become aware of malicious attacks attempting to exploit a recently patched vulnerability affecting the company’s Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software. No other information has been provided by the networking giant, but it’s worth noting that aproof-of-concept (PoC) exploit designed to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on devices running…
Macro-less malware: The cyclical attack
Last year, attackers linked to the Russian hacking group APT28 (sometimes called Fancy Bear) started hacking like its 1999 with Microsoft Word-based malware that doesn’t trigger security warnings along the way. These types of attacks are called “macro-less malware” because they bypass the security warnings added to Microsoft Office programs in response to traditional macro…
The Price of Cybercrime: 9 Years in One Case, 6 Months in Another
Travon Williams, 33, was sentenced by the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to 9 years in jail for his role in a credit card fraud and identity theft scheme. For more than two years, Williams led a gang that purchased thousands of stolen credit and debit card numbers from the dark web….
Six Months in Jail for University Email Hacker
A man who accessed over 1,000 email accounts maintained by a New York City-area university to download in appropriate photos and videos was sentenced to 6 months in prison this week. The man, Jonathan Powell, 30, of Phoenix, Arizona, pled guilty to the charges on August 9, 2017, in Manhattan federal court before United States…
Cyber attacks surge, ransomware leading the way
The Online Trust Alliance (OTA) found that cyber incidents targeting businesses nearly doubled from 82,000 in 2016 to 159,700 in 2017. Since the majority of cyber incidents are never reported, OTA believes the actual number in 2017 could easily exceed 350,000. “Surprising no one, 2017 marked another ‘worst year ever’ in data breaches and cyber incidents around the world,”…
Data breaches at an all time high: How are businesses protecting themselves?
Digitally transformative technologies are shaping the way organisations do business and moving them to a data-driven world, with 94% of organisations using sensitive data in cloud, big data, IoT, container, blockchain and/or mobile environments, according to the 2018 Thales Data Threat Report. Digital transformation is driving efficiency and scale as well as making possible new business…