Sixty-five percent of executives and employees in large IT firms in North America reported being recruited by ransomware threat actors to help facilitate attacks between December 7, 2021 and January 4, 2022, which was 17 percentage points higher than in November, BleepingComputer reports.
Most attackers contacted employees through email or social media although phone calls were found to be the means of communication in 27% of approach efforts, according to a Hitachi ID survey. The poll also showed that most were given a deal of lower than $500,000 in cash for their cooperation in the ransomware attack.
Researchers also discovered that insider threats are commonly ignored and not considered in companies' cybersecurity plans. While 53% of IT executives reported being equally worried about internal and external threats, 36% were more concerned about external threats and 3% were unbothered by either threat. Most organizations were also discovered not to adopt security measures aimed at mitigating insider threats.
Ukrainian hacktivist operation IT Army has taken responsibility for a significant distributed denial-of-service attack against Russian local airline booking system Leonardo, which is used by over 50 Russian carriers, according to The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.
New attacks with the updated SysUpdate toolkit have been deployed by Chinese advanced persistent threat operation Budworm, also known as APT27, Emissary Panda, Bronze Union, Lucky Mouse, Iron Tiger, and Red Phoenix, against an Asian government and a Middle East-based telecommunications provider, reports The Hacker News.
Forty-five malicious NPM and PyPI packages have been deployed by threat actors to facilitate extensive data theft operations as part of a campaign that commenced on Sept. 12, according to BleepingComputer.