Cyberattacks surged by 380% between 2014 and 2015Credit: Markus Spiske. The European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) has become the latest power sector organisation to have fallen victim of a cyberattack. ENTSO-E – which represents 42 European transmission system operators in 35 countries – said on 9 March 2020 it had recently...Read More

At least 19 websites have fallen victim to a new data skimmer that appears to have been developed by threat group Magecart Group 7. Dubbed ‘MakeFrame’ by researchers at RiskIQ, the new data skimmer has been spotted out in the wild in several different versions. Researchers first came across the skimmer on January 24. Since then,...Read More

A digital wallet app with millions of users has become the latest organization to be caught storing customer data in unsecured Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 buckets.  Researchers at vpnMentor discovered five misconfigured buckets containing the personal data of 14 million users of the Key Ring app.  The Key Ring app allows users to upload and store scans and...Read More

Scammers are targeting Londoners with fake fine notification texts that accuse victims of flouting the country’s lockdown rules. The malicious text has been designed to look like a genuine COVID-19 alert sent by the UK government. Victims who receive the message are told that they have been fined £35 after being spotted leaving their home...Read More

Infosecurity Europe 2020, due to take place June 2-4, has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, event organizers Reed Exhibitions have just announced. Held annually at London Olympia, Infosecurity Europe is Europe’s largest and most comprehensive information security event, attracting thousands of visitors from the information security industry every year. A statement from Reed...Read More

Over 2000 new phishing domains have been set up over the past month to capitalize on the surging demand for Zoom from home workers, according to new data from BrandShield. The brand protection company analyzed data from its threat hunting system since the start of the year, and found 3300 new domains had been registered...Read More

Microsoft has been forced to alert several dozen hospitals in a “first of its kind notification” that their gateway and VPN appliances are vulnerable to ransomware groups actively scanning for exposed endpoints. The tech giant claimed that attackers behind the REvil (Sodinokibi) variant, for one, are probing the internet for vulnerable systems, with VPNs in...Read More

Businesses have been urged to tighten their data protection technologies, policies and procedures after a UK Supreme Court ruling yesterday left the door open for employers to be sued by their staff for insider breaches. The case involved supermarket chain Morrisons, which suffered such a breach in 2014 when former internal auditor Andrew Skelton published...Read More

The controversial Israeli technology company NSO Group is attempting to woo Western governments with software it says can analyse the spread of COVID-19 using mobile phone data. NSO Group is currently being sued by Facebook for allegedly hacking WhatsApp, an accusation which the company denies. It also denies developing spyware tools which critics say it...Read More

America’s two oceans that once symbolized an enduring national myth of invulnerability from faraway health disasters and malevolent threats no longer offer any such illusion. Two huge game changers, trans-ocean airliners and a globally-wired-together, AI-empowered Internet of Things, have rendered previous geographical separations and territorial boundary controls defensively impotent against highly-infectious new breeds of biological...Read More

The various threat intelligence stories in this iteration of the Weekly Threat Briefing discuss the following topics: APT, Data Leak, Mobile Malware, Parallax, TrickBot, and Vulnerabilities. The IOCs related to these stories are attached to the Weekly Threat Briefing and can be used to check your logs for potential malicious activity. Figure 1 – IOC...Read More

A cybersecurity company has launched a lockdown-friendly hacking competition that doesn’t require any travel or socializing.  Participants of Cyber 2.0’s new Home Hackers Challenge can compete for a cash prize without having to leave their houses.  The competition is open to every hacker in the world, and the premise is simple—the first competitor to break into a...Read More

An American healthcare provider whose patients’ records were allegedly published online in a ransomware attack has told patients their data is secure. Affordacare runs an urgent care walk-in clinic network out of five locations in Texas. The organization was hit by a ransomware attack in February. In a breach notification published on the organization’s website, Affordacare wrote: “Hackers...Read More

More ransomware victims than ever before are complying with the demands of their cyber-attackers by handing over cash to retrieve encrypted files.  New research published March 31 by CyberEdge shows that both the number of ransomware attacks and the percentage of attacks that result in payment have increased every year since 2017. The CyberEdge 2020 Cyberthreat...Read More

UK businesses could be putting customer data at risk by having a low understanding of important data protection legislation. Research from IONOS has shown that 44% of IT decision makers in the UK do not have a comprehensive understanding of the US CLOUD Act. In contrast, 92% had a comprehensive understanding of the EU’s General Data Protection...Read More

Chinese conspiracy theories that COVID-19 was some kind of US military bioweapon date back to January, months before a foreign ministry official in Beijing began to spread the same fake news, according to a new study. An analysis from the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center has revealed how fringe conspiracy theories can eventually become weaponized...Read More

Online threats have risen by as much as six-times their usual levels over the past four weeks as the COVID-19 pandemic provides new ballast for cyber-attacks, according to Cloudflare. The web security and content delivery vendor analyzed UK traffic figures for the past four weeks compared to the previous month and noted a sharp uptick...Read More

A new partnership has been announced between the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the IASME Consortium to relaunch the Cyber Essentials Scheme, with IASME as the sole certification body. The NCSC has carried out research, determining the path to certification for Cyber Essentials could be made clearer, that the standard was being implemented consistently...Read More

A company claiming to provide “the world’s most secure online backup” leaked metadata and customer information in over 135 million records after misconfiguring an online database, Infosecurity has learned. The team at vpnMentor discovered the privacy snafu as part of its ongoing web mapping project that has already uncovered major cloud data leaks at brands...Read More

By Sam Wong , Adam Vaughan , Conrad Quilty-Harper and Layal Liverpool British Airways planes parked up in a row at Gatwick airport.Mike Hewitt/Getty Images Latest coronavirus news as of 5PM on 31 March Planes grounded as flight demand continues to fall British Airways will suspend all flights to and from London’s Gatwick airport. The...Read More