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DataBank Threat Report: Mapping cybercriminal activity across the world

Netherlands top producer of zombie IP addresses

During the past month, the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, Africa) was the leading source of all zombie IP addresses. Of the countries making up the EMEA, the Netherlands was the top-producing country. For the other regions, the top producers were Brazil in South America, the United States in North America and India in the Asia-Pacific region. Source: Symantec

NEW JERSEY – A former software developer was sentenced to two years in prison after being found guilty of building a botnet of more than 100,000 compromised computers worldwide and using it to unleash distributed denial-of-service attacks that took down several sites. Bruce Raisley, 48, launched the attacks in retaliation for embarrassing articles and photos published about him.


OTTOWA, CANADA – An online pay system that provides information to civil servants about overtime, bonuses and other financial data was taken offline after officials discovered that the privacy of eight account holders had been compromised. Government officials said the fault was due to an internal error, but some speculate it was related to a Chinese-based cyberattack discovered in January.

ALBERTA, CANADA – A USB stick containing the résumés, employment records and possibly banking data of 7,000 Edmonton Public School Board employees has gone missing. School board staff violated policy by retaining too much data for too long and failing to keep a record of the information downloaded to the USB drive, said Frank Work, Alberta's privacy commissioner.

AUSTIN, TEXAS – The Texas State Comptroller's office has fired four employees, including its heads of information security and innovation and technology, following a data breach that exposed the Social Security numbers of more than 3.2 million people state residents. Meanwhile, a class action lawsuit was filed in federal court on behalf of the breach victims.

LANCASTER COUNTY, S.C. – Hackers obtained the Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and other personal information of 25,000 current and former school county school district students and 2,500 employees. The intrusion was discovered by the Department of Homeland Security, and investigators believe the hackers were working out of Russia.

SOUTH KOREA – Prosecutors here believe North Korea's intelligence agency, known as the Reconnaissance General Bureau, is responsible for an attack on the network of agricultural cooperative lender Nonghyup. The laptop of an IBM contractor working for the bank was infected, which allowed sensitive server files to be deleted.
 
AUSTRALIA – The Federal Police warned residents about purchasing cheap software because it may contain a trojan. The advisory came after authorities seized pirated computer products belonging to a 40-year-old resident of Lyndhurst, Victoria. They included counterfeit Adobe software that contained a data-stealing trojan.
 
GERMANY – A software company is threatening to sue a security researcher after he discovered a buffer overflow vulnerability in the company's music application, Dark Reading first reported. The researcher was threatened after he sent a “non-harmful” proof-of-concept to the company to demonstrate the flaw.
 
NETHERLANDS – Rabobank, a federation of credit unions that specializes in food and agriculture finance, was hit by a sustained distributed denial-of-service attack that disabled web and mobile banking. Officials at the bank, which operates in 48 nations, did not disclose who was behind the attack.

RUSSIA – Ivan Kaspersky, who reportedly was kidnapped for a ransom of $4.3 million, was rescued. The 20-year-old son of Eugene Kaspersky, Kaspersky Lab co-founder and the nation's wealthiest businessmen, was freed unharmed through an operation conducted by the Federal Security Service and local police.

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