A federal jury last week awarded a Minneapolis policewoman $585,000 after determining that fellow city employees, including other law enforcement officers, repeatedly accessed her DMV records without any legal justification. Officer Amy Krekelberg originally filed suit in a Minnesota federal district court in 2013, alleging multiple violations of the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act from 2009…
Researchers earlier this year discovered a modular backdoor that delivers one of eight different cryptominers to infected systems, as well as malicious plug-ins that exploit the UPnP and SMB protocols. Written in C and compiled with Mingw GCC, the malware, dubbed Plurox, was discovered last February by researchers at Kaspersky, who believe they detected the…
An ongoing email-based phishing scam is attempting to fool recipients into opening malicious attachments disguised as notifications from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in a warning posted on the official US-CERT web site this past Tuesday. “The email campaign uses a spoofed email address to…
Malicious actors are attempting to infect computers running Tiny Core Linux virtual machines with an XMRig-based cryptominer that’s being bundled with pirated copies of Virtual Studio Technology (VST) software applications. Dubbed LoudMiner, the Monero-mining software first appeared in August 2018, and works by abusing virtualization software – QEMU on macOS machines and VirtualBox on Windows devices.…
Personal information belonging to residents and employees of multiple assisted living facilities were potentially exposed in an April 2019 cyberattack that infected third-party software company Tenx Systems, LLC with ransomware. The Minneapolis-based company, which operates under the name ResiDex Software and provides software to assisted-living homes, group facilities and care-giving organizations for seniors and the…
Oregon’s Department of Human Services (DHS) is in the process of mailing notifications to roughly 645,000 of its reportedly 1.6 million clients, following a data breach incident last January that resulted from a phishing scam. When DHS first publicly disclosed the incident last March, it said the number of affected Oregonians exceeded 350,000, but it…
Iran is reportedly claiming that it successfully uprooted a CIA-led cyberespionage operation and arrested several U.S. spies in the process. “One of the most complicated CIA cyberespionage networks that had an important role in the CIA’s operations in different countries was exposed by the Iranian intelligence agencies a while ago and was dismantled,” said Ali…
A newly discovered cyber espionage campaign has been targeting Android users in the Middle East with malware designed to steal scores of device information, snoop on victims and potentially take over mobile devices. Known as GolfSpy, the malware is found in once-legitimate applications that have been repackaged to contain malicious code, according to a June…
The purportedly final version of GandCrab ransomware can now be neutralized with a new decryption tool, made available to the public. This latest decryptor is effective against versions 1, 4 and 5.x up through 5.2. Version 5.2 is the last iteration created by the prolific ransomware’s developers before they announced on a dark web forum…
A performance audit of six U.S. government agencies found that four of them are still using knowledge-based questions to verify the identities of individuals applying for federal benefits or services, even though this practice is considered outdated and insecure, especially in light of the 2017 Equifax breach. Knowledge-based verification questions are typically created by credit…
