Literally countless life or death situations were at stake. A large medical provider recently was hit with a ransomware attack request for $3.5 million. “They had to pay,” explains Ondrej Krehel, CEO of New York-based LIFARS, which managed the response. The medical company’s critical servers for its 300 locations were breached, and recovery from the…
Attribution is difficult and sometimes it seems that cybercriminals are beyond the long arm of the law. But hackers – some even foreign nationals – were increasingly brought to justice on both sides of the Atlantic in 2018 for various cybercrimes. They were indicted, arrested, convicted and, in many cases, sentenced and jailed for a…
A new report about a Nigeria-based cybercrime ring describes in detail how lonely targets are emotionally preyed upon and in some cases bilked of their life savings through romance scams. Citing data from the Better Business Bureau, Agari Cyber Intelligence Division (ACID) reports such scams have led to personal losses of nearly $1 billion in…
As the U.S. economy takes investors on a wild ride, turning all the usual indicators topsy-turvy and sparking concern that the bear will usurp the bull, one market seems to be on a perpetual upswing — cybercrime. Threat intelligence researchers agree that adversaries are well connected in the sophisticated virtual labyrinths of the dark web,…
While the cybercrime ecosystem usually conjures a 21st Century online bazaar for buying and selling credit card numbers, some hackers possess loftier goals. Attackers stepped into a honeypot environment that was set up by Cybereason to emulate a gateway to a power substation of a major electricity provider in the U.S. shortly after credential became…
While official governments generally are smart enough not to directly employ attackers to carry out their missives, none of the researchers discovered smoking guns linking criminal operations to official governments. Still, intermediaries typically contact “hackers for hire engaged with bodies potentially representing nation states,” McAfee’s Raj Samani says. It’s only “logical for any nation state…
DDoS attackers who bought and sold services and kits offered in the defunct marketplace webstresser.org are now being targeted for prosecution by authorities in 20 countries. Following up on the April 2018 takedown of the now disabled webstresser.org in the effort known as Operation Power OFF, investigators are now tracking its 151,000 registered users, reported…
The French aircraft manufacturer Airbus reported it detected a cyber incident on its commercial aircraft business information systems, which resulted in unauthorized access to personal data. The company said in a statement there is no impact on Airbus’ commercial operations. “This incident is being thoroughly investigated by Airbus’ experts who have taken immediate and appropriate…
Persistent malicious attacks exposing cloud infrastructure are the result of a perfect storm combining cryptomining, ransomware and botnet/worms for both Linux and Windows, the Securonix Threat Research Team reported. “The attack activity described in the report is likely prevalent and mass-scale,” Oleg Kolesnikov told SC Media. The research Addison, Texas-based Securonix provides further insight into…
More than 100,000 households that had applied for public assistance services from the Alaskan State Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) had their data breached last spring, the applicants just learned. The impact of a Zeus/Zbot Trojan virus attack discovered in late April was initially thought to affect only about 500 Alaskans, but further investigation…
