Since last year, the scale and severity of ransomware attacks have escalated to an alarming level. On top of raising the amount of ransom, bad actors have also shifted the target victim from small-to-medium virtual businesses to large-scale brick and mortar entities that are the pulse of America – critical infrastructures; the sector that supplies the life essentials to the nation, from water and electricity to transportation and education. As the core engines for the country, these companies are key targets for cybercriminals as they are too important to ignore the threats and the country cannot afford any of them to…
ISBuzz Team
Hackers have broken into gaming giant Electronic Arts, the publisher of Battlefield, FIFA, and The Sims, and stole a wealth of game source code and related internal tools. “You have full capability of exploiting on all EA services,” the hackers claimed in various posts on underground hacking forums. A source with access to the forums, some of which are locked from public view, provided Motherboard with screenshots of the messages. In those forum posts the hackers said they have taken the source code for FIFA 21, as well as code for its matchmaking server. The hackers also said they have obtained source code and tools for the…
BACKGROUND: Researchers from Toshiba have successfully sent quantum information over 600-kilometer-long optical fibers, creating a new distance record and paving the way for large-scale quantum networks that could be used to exchange information securely between cities and even countries. Working from the company’s R&D lab in Cambridge in the UK, the scientists demonstrated that they could transmit quantum bits (or qubits) over hundreds of kilometers of optical fiber without scrambling the fragile quantum data encoded in the particles, thanks to a new technology that stabilizes the environmental fluctuations occurring in the fiber.
BACKGROUND: The Italian government has announced plans to set up a national cybersecurity agency as part of a wider initiative to create a secure, unified cloud infrastructure for the country. The announcements comes after a slew of ransomware attacks in recent months, with recent high profile examples including Colonial Pipeline and JBS.
The world’s largest meat processing company has paid the equivalent of $11m (£7.8m) in ransom to put an end to a major cyber-attack. Computer networks at JBS were hacked last week, temporarily shutting down some operations in Australia, Canada, and the US. The payment was reportedly made using Bitcoin after plants had come back online. JBS says it was necessary to pay to protect customers, with JBS chief executive Andre Nogueira commenting, “This was a very difficult decision to make for our company and for me personally.
BACKGROUND: Researchers at Nordlocker have reported on Nameless malware that stole 1.2 TB of private data, discussing their case study of a 1.2-terabyte database collected from “over 3 million Windows-based computers” between 2018 and 2020 by a “Trojan-type malware.” Their analysis offers details on the malware used, data & file types and programs/ apps targeted, including: Downloaded software included illegal Adobe Photoshop 2018, a Windows cracking tool, and several cracked gamesInfected 3.25 million Windows based computers26 million login credentials stolen between 2018 and 2020Screenshots & camera images collected
BACKGROUND: It has been reported that The world’s largest password collection was posted on a prominent hacker forum. A member submitted a 100 GB text file containing 8.4 billion passwords, most likely compiled from previous data breaches and security breaches, according to Cyber News. The creator of the post claims that all passwords are between 6 and 20 characters long, with all characters non-ASCII characters and white spaces removed. While the author claims that the text file he provided contains 82 billion passwords, tests by CyberNews show that the actual number of passwords is almost ten times smaller at 8,459,060,239 unique entries.
For many years, information security has been built on the concept of perimeter-based network security that assumes all internal entities within a network boundary are trusted and external entities are not trusted. It is this model that has formed the basis from which many companies have allowed access to their networks for decades. However, the tide on this arguably outdated trust-based notion of access is turning. While the network perimeter is known to be the boundary between an organisation’s secured internal network and the internet (or other external, untrusted parties), these boundaries are now shifting. Indeed, the coronavirus pandemic has…
The Colonial Pipeline CEO has defended the action he took in response to the recent ransomware attack on his company, telling a Senate hearing on Tuesday his priority was to restore service as quickly as possible. He also informed the Senate hearing the company paid the $5 million ransom one day after Russian-based cybercriminals hacked its IT network, crippling fuel deliveries up and down the East Coast.
BACKGROUND: In light of the ongoing conversation around the Colonial Pipeline hack and the latest findings showing that hackers used a VPN account to breach the network using just a compromised username and password, security experts provide detail insight below on the security threats of VPN and what organisations can do to manage the risk of ransomware.