Security News > 2020 > January
On the last day of 2019, foreign exchange company Travelex was hit by cyber attackers wielding the Sodinokibi ransomware. More than a week later, the company's websites and online services are still offline despite the company's remediation efforts.
The US Department of Homeland Security has issued a total of three warnings in the last few days encouraging people to be on the alert for physical and cyber attacks from Iran. The warnings directly address IT professionals with advice on how to secure their networks against Iranian attack.
Facebook will be using its own staff, as well as independent fact-checkers, to judge a video's authenticity. Given the latitude the new policy gives to satire, parody, or videos altered with simple/cheapo technologies, it might mean that some pretty infamous, and widely shared, cheapfakes will be given a pass and left on the platform.
You know the type: the profilers, the data harvesters, the location-stealers. Big data empire builders who maintain hundreds of millions of individual profiles - then leave them around for anyone to copy.
Cloudflare, the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, announced that it has launched Cloudflare for Teams, a set of solutions that will secure corporations and their employees globally, without sacrificing performance. Cloudflare for Teams is centered around two core products: Cloudflare Access and Cloudflare Gateway.
MITRE released an ATT&CK knowledge base of the tactics and techniques that cyber adversaries use when attacking ICS that operate some of the nation's most critical infrastructures including energy transmission and distribution plants, oil refineries, wastewater treatment facilities, transportation systems, and more. Some aspects of the existing ATT&CK knowledge base for enterprise IT systems are applicable to ICS, and in many cases may represent an entry point into those ICS systems for adversaries.
Not only are the US elections arguably some of the most influential on the global stage, but the infamous cyber attack on Clinton campaign manager John Podesta during the 2016 presidential elections was a watershed moment. The threat of foreign interference takes many forms, from the more subtle use of fake news and online trolls to confuse and frustrate the political discourse, to direct attacks on vulnerable voting infrastructure and to disrupt or breach political parties and individuals.
More than a week after its website and online services were taken offline by malware, foreign currency super-exchange Travelex continues to battle through what has become an increasingly damaging outage that may have unpatched VPN servers at its heart. While the capital's cops declined to name a specific victim, a spokesperson told us: "On Thursday, 2 January the Met's Cyber Crime Team were contacted with regards to a reported ransomware attack involving a foreign currency exchange. Enquiries into the circumstances are ongoing."
Frost and Sullivan has predicted that there will be at least 26 fully fledged major smart cities around the world by 2025. This should offer cause for concern to those in charge of smart cities as once a threat actor has infiltrated the IT environment, they could move laterally into an OT system if they are not properly segmented from each other.
Referred to as BRONZE PRESIDENT, the group may have been active since at least 2014, also targeting political and law enforcement organizations and using both proprietary and publicly available tools to monitor the activity of targeted organizations, discredit their work, or steal their intellectual property. BRONZE PRESIDENT targets NGOs that conduct research on issues relevant to China, the group's infrastructure is linked to entities in China, a subset of the group's operational infrastructure is linked to China-based Internet service providers, and the hackers leverage tools such as PlugX, which have historically been used by Chinese threat groups.