Security News > 2020 > August
The Cambridge Cybercrime Centre has a series of papers on cybercrime during the coronavirus pandemic. EDITED TO ADD (8/12): Interpol report....
A judge in Paris has ordered a French trial for Alexander Vinnik, a Russian suspected of money laundering on the bitcoin exchange BTC-e, also wanted by Washington and Moscow, his lawyer and other sources told AFP. Vinnik was extradited to France in January from Greece, where he had been arrested on an American warrant in 2017. Vinnik allegedly operated the BTC-e exchange until his arrest at the northern Greek tourist resort of Halkidiki, which set off a three-way extradition tussle between the United States, France and Russia.
PE Tree, a malware reverse-engineering, open source tool developed by the BlackBerry Research and Intelligence team, has been made available for free to the cybersecurity community. PE Tree allows malware analysts to view Portable Executable files in a tree-view using pefile - a multi-platform Python module that parses and works with PE files - and PyQt5, a module that can be used to create graphical user interfaces.
Mimecast released the Threat Intelligence Report: Black Hat U.S.A. Edition 2020, which presents insights gleaned from the analysis of 195 billion emails processed by Mimecast for its customers from January through June 2020. The majority of attacks seen by Mimecast during this period were simple, high volume forms of attacks, such as spam and phishing that is likely a reflection of the ease of access to tools and kits available online.
Security firm recommends digital distancing for devices and more collaboration between IT and security teams to harden the attack surface. A survey of security professionals finds that hackers are getting more aggressive as IT and security teams continue their internal turf battles.
Former UK trade minister and current Conservative MP Dr. Liam Fox has been named as the source of hacked trade documents released during last year's British elections. A report from Reuters cited two anonymous sources who say that the 58 year-old Fox, who has since stepped down, had an email account taken over by Russian hackers, who then used it to obtain and release documents about Anglo-American trade talks.
Organizational security has always been a priority for business leaders and managers, and now, as some offices start reopening and employees have the option to work remotely or from the office, maintaining security has never been more complex. Adopt security tools: An IT team will benefit from implementing security tools and solutions, such as a security information and event management tool that identifies anomalous behavior, flags issues in real-time and can help mitigate and protect against potentially devastating incidents.
Cybersecurity professionals know all too well that crises tend to breed new threats to organizational security. Health agencies are being attacked, massive phishing operations are underway, and security flaws in leading communications platforms are coming to light.
Instead of relying on customers to protect their vulnerable smart home devices from being used in cyberattacks, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and National University of Singapore researchers have developed a new method that enables telecommunications and internet service providers to monitor these devices. The researchers developed a method to detect connected, vulnerable IoT models before they are compromised by monitoring the data traffic from each smart home device.
Because of the pandemic, almost 40 percent of those organizations have had no or critically restricted access to their data centers to address storage hardware failures or increase data protection levels, such as improved drive redundancies or snapshot intervals. 20 percent of organizations have not had any access to their data centers, meaning that any physical hardware failures have had to wait.