Law enforcement officials at home and abroad have arrested 281 individuals over a span of four months, in a massive crackdown on various business email compromise scams, the Justice Department announced yesterday. Dubbed Operation reWired, the coordinated campaign began in May 2019 and has resulted in 72 arrests in the U.S., and 167 in Nigeria,…
Executives from leading technology and social media firms convened with U.S. intelligence representatives yesterday to discuss ongoing efforts to shield their platforms and users from election interference campaigns. According to Bloomberg and additional news outlets, Facebook used its Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters to host the meeting, which was attended by Google, Microsoft, Twitter and members…
Paying a ransom to regain access to a city’s data and systems has become increasingly common over the last few months. However, one study shows that most taxpayers are not happy when their elected officials give in to an attacker’s demand. Sixty percent of taxpayers said they are against giving in to the ransom demanded…
The Federal Trade Commission and New York Attorney General’s office today announced that Google and its subsidiary YouTube agreed to an unprecedented $170 million in fines for allegedly using cookies to harvest personal data from minors without parental consent and then serve behavioral ads based on this information. Such actions are in violation of the…
The 2007 Stuxnet virus attack perpetrated against Iran’s then-budding nuclear program was made possible after U.S. and Israeli intelligence coordinated with Dutch intelligence agency AIVD to recruit an Iranian engineer as a mole who could infect Iran’s enrichment plant near Natanz, Yahoo News reported this week. The engineer initially provided data that helped Stuxnet’s authors…
First American Financial Corp. is reportedly the subject of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, following the discovery of a website defect that left 885 million documents exposed to the public. Earlier this year, the financial services company’s website was found to have allowed anyone with a web browser and a URL for a…
Republican members of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Reform this week sent open letters to both Capital One and Amazon, requesting that both companies arrange a briefing with Congressional staff members regarding Capital One’s recently announced data breach. Last Monday, McLean, Va.-based Capital One Financial Corporation publicly acknowledged that an unauthorized individual…
U.S. Senators Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and Mark Warner, D-Va., have introduced federal legislation designed to protect critical technologies from supply chain attacks by China and other foreign threat actors. The bill, known as S. 2316 or the The Manufacturing, Investment, and Controls Review for Computer Hardware, Intellectual Property and Supply (MICROCHIPS) Act, would require U.S.…
The Georgia State Patrol was reportedly the target of a July 26 ransomware attack that has necessitated the precautionary shutdown of its servers and network. Per local news affiliate WHNT, the GSP has confirmed that the incidence could slightly impact response times; however, members of the force still have other channels of communication such as…
Russian state-sponsored cyber actors “conducted an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. elections,” the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concludes in the first volume of its report on Russia’s efforts to interference in America’s most recent presidential election. Released yesterday, volume one focuses specifically on…
