Stopping the ransomware epidemic is less about tackling individual crypto-locking malware variants and more about combating the entire ecosystem of bad actors underpinning digital extortion, the British government said Monday. Behind any infection from name-brand ransomware such as LockBit or BlackCat lies a loose network of affiliates, initial access brokers and other actors, warned the…

After the attack comes the bill: Ransomware and data-exfiltration attacks continue to stick victims with serious cleanup, legal and other costs. Cloud computing giant Rackspace has so far spent $10.8 million responding to an attack against its hosted Exchange environment by the Play ransomware group that began late last November, the company said in an…

Threat actors’ use of Cloudflare R2 to host phishing pages has witnessed a 61-fold increase over the past six months. “The majority of the phishing campaigns target Microsoft login credentials, although there are some pages targeting Adobe, Dropbox, and other cloud apps,” Netskope security researcher Jan Michael said. Cloudflare R2, analogous to Amazon Web Service…

An international law enforcement operation took down a phishing-as-a-service website that security researchers say was responsible for more than 150,000 phishing domains. Authorities in Indonesia arrested the site’s alleged administrator and another man, while Japanese police arrested an additional suspect, Interpol announced Tuesday. The site, 16shop, has been in existence since at least 2017. It…

The Biden administration says it want to get ahead of ransomware attacks against schools before tens of millions of pupils resume studies later this month. Typically understaffed and underfunded when it comes to cybersecurity, American K-12 schools have experienced a ramp-up in ransomware attacks, particularly after the novel coronavirus pandemic forced hasty adoption of remote…

A five-year old vulnerability in Fortinet SSL VPNs remains one of the most widely exploited flaws in enterprise networks, despite repeat patch warnings. So say cybersecurity officials across the U.S. and its Five Eyes intelligence alliance partners in a new joint security advisory detailing the 12 most common vulnerabilities and exposures that were most “routinely…

The desire for digital acceleration has led organizations to drive toward delivering faster and better application experiences and to bring applications and data closer to users and devices. Many organizations realize that application journeys are fluid in practice because applications can live anywhere from data centers to hybrid and multi-clouds to edge compute. The reason…

The security directive for pipeline owners and operators — released following the disruptive cyberattack that hit Colonial Pipeline in 2021 — requires them to implement measures to improve their defenses against cyberattacks. The TSA updated the requirements in July 2022 to offer more flexibility in achieving the outlined goals. Exactly one year later, the agency…