Cybersecurity & Espionage Articles
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Original Post at Rueters.com
Veteran espionage researcher Jon DiMaggio was hot on the trail three months ago of what on the face of it looked like a menacing new industrial espionage attack by Russian cyber spies. All the hallmarks were there: targeted phishing emails common to government espionage, an advanced Trojan horse for stealing data from inside organizations, covert communication channels for grabbing documents and clues in the programming code indicating its authors were Russian speakers. It took weeks before the lead cyber spying investigator at Symantec, a top U.S. computer security firm, figured out instead he was tracking a lone-wolf cyber criminal. Original Post at PlasticSurgeryPractice.com
Celebrities are among the clients of a high-profile European plastic surgery clinic that was attacked by hackers, who today released thousands of intimate before-and-after images. Grozio Chirurgija in Lithuania had its servers breached by a group known as Tsar Team, who broke in and stole more than 25,000 private photographs as well as personal information Original Post at Softpedia.com
Over the past couple of weeks, there's been a lot of talk about who's behind the WannaCry ransomware, with some researchers pointing to code that's the same as that used by the North Korean Lazarus group, and others saying there's little chance for them to be behind it all. Now, another analysis points towards the WannaCry code being written by native Chinese speakers. According to US intelligence company Flashpoint, it might have been a group of native Chinese speakers who wrote the ransomware that hit some 300,000 devices in 150 countries. Evidence, they say, is the style and accuracy of the Chinese notes, as well as their lengthier formats. They claim with "moderate confidence" that they are the work of a native Chinese speaker. Original Post at MacRumors.com
German hackers have successfully broken the iris recognition authentication in the Samsung Galaxy S8 using equipment that costs less than the price of the smartphone, according to Ars Technica. Hackers with the Chaos Computer Club used a digital camera, a Samsung laser printer, and a contact lens to achieve the feat. The hack involved taking a picture of the phone owner's face, printing it out on paper, carefully placing the contact lens on the iris in the printout, and holding the image in front of the locked Galaxy S8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccQZs8Ofpuk Original Post at HelpNetSecurity.com
40% of organizations believe that C-level executives, including the CEO, are most at risk of being hacked when working outside of the office, according to a new report from iPass. Cafés and coffee shops were ranked the number one high-risk venue by 42 percent of respondents, from a list also including airports (30%), hotels (16%), exhibition centers (7%) and airplanes (4%). Original Post at Graham Cluley.com
US politicians are drafting a bill that - if approved - could allow companies and individuals to "hack back", allowing victims of a hack to "access without authorization the computer of the attacker... to gather information in order to establish attribution of criminal activity to share with law enforcement or to disrupt continued unauthorized activity against the victim's own network." Original Post at Reuters
Cyber security firm Symantec Corp (SYMC.O) said on Monday it was "highly likely" a hacking group affiliated with North Korea was behind the WannaCry cyber attack this month that infected more than 300,000 computers worldwide and disrupted hospitals, banks and schools across the globe. Symantec researchers said they had found multiple instances of code that had been used both in the North Korea-linked group's previous activity and in early versions of WannaCry. In addition, the same Internet connection was used to install an early version of WannaCry on two computers and to communicate with a tool that destroyed files at Sony Pictures Entertainment. The U.S. government and private companies have accused North Korea in the 2014 Sony attack. Original Post at Softpedia.com
And thanks to new software developed by French researcher Adrien Guinet, Windows XP users whose computers were compromised by WannaCry can remove the infection without having to pay the $300 ransom. A tool that he posted on Github can search for the decryption key in the memory if the computer wasn’t rebooted after being infected, so if you already restarted the system and it then got locked down by WannaCrypt, this isn’t going to work. Original Post at Softpedia.com
Restaurant guide Zomato has announced that it has been the victim of a data breach which saw the records of 17 million users being stolen from its database. The bad news is that 6.6 million of those are already on sale on a dark web marketplace. The good news is that the company has more than 120 million users from 24 countries across the globe, and the data breach only affects 17 million of those. Original Post at CNN.com
In little more than three decades, China has transformed itself from a closed-off Asian nation mired in poverty to an emerging superpower that rivals the United States. Now, the tendrils of Chinese influence are gradually wrapping themselves around the world, upending roles and relationships that have dominated the global order for half a century. The latest step in China’s evolution as a global power is President Xi Jinping’s grand plan for the world economy that draws on the millennia-old tradition of the Silk Road trading route. We explore five ways China is changing communities and lives across the globe – with its financial clout and its influence on culture, education, travel and the military balance of power. |
Cyber-CyI find interesting articles on the web that are simple, down-to-earth, easy to understand, and (hopefully) informative for non-technical readers. Archives
November 2022
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