Security News > 2020 > December
A warning issued this week by the FBI warns owners of smart home devices with voice and video capabilities that these types of systems have been targeted by individuals who launch so-called "Swatting" attacks. "Smart home device manufacturers recently notified law enforcement that offenders have been using stolen e-mail passwords to access smart devices with cameras and voice capabilities and carry out swatting attacks," the FBI said.
Data breaches at Adobe, Target, Home Depot, and Neiman Marcus are only a few examples, in which hackers have mounted targeted attacks against an organization's supply chain. As companies improved their defenses against direct network attacks, hackers shifted their focus to the weakest link by exploiting the supply chain to gain backdoor access to IT systems.
As 2020 draws to a close, it's clear that work-from-home security, ransomware, COVID-19-themed social engineering and attacks by nation-states will go down as defining topics for the cybersecurity world for the year. One of Threatpost's Top 5 most-read stories covered the meteoric rise of the game Among Us, and how it outpaced its developer's ability to keep up with malicious actors.
To be blunt to many of the people that seek power are doing it out of pure self interest knowing the further they rise up the hierarchy the more power and status they get, and the fastest way up is via "Dead men's shoes". So now consider your idea again but thinking about "Power struggles" and what those with power and status do with it and why?
The United States Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has issued an alert to warn financial institutions of fraud and cyberattacks related to COVID-19 vaccines. In its newly released alert, FinCEN tells financial institutions to be wary of "Potential for fraud, ransomware attacks, or similar types of criminal activity related to COVID-19 vaccines and their distribution."
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has ordered all US federal agencies to update the SolarWinds Orion platform to the latest version by the end of business hours on December 31, 2020. CISA's Supplemental Guidance to Emergency Directive 21-01 demands this from all agencies using Orion versions unaffected in the SolarWinds supply chain attack.
T-Mobile has announced a data breach exposing customers' proprietary network information, including phone numbers and call records. After bringing in a cybersecurity firm to perform an investigation, T-Mobile found that threat actors gained access to the telecommunications information generated by customers, known as CPNI. The information exposed in this breach includes phone numbers, call records, and the number of lines on an account.
Ken Xie, founder, chairman of the board and CEO at Fortinet, does not pull any punches in his World Economic Forum commentary Four key challenges for cybersecurity leaders. Xie stresses the need for cybersecurity to be part of the initial design.
The internal networks of Lithuania's National Center for Public Health and several municipalities have been infected with Emotet malware following a large campaign targeting the country's state institutions. NVSC information technology specialists, together with experts from the Central State Telecommunications Center and the National Cyber Security Center currently working on cleaning affected systems of the Emotet infection, as well as on recovering NVSC e-mails and restoring email access.
A newly discovered and self-spreading Golang-based malware has been actively dropping XMRig cryptocurrency miners on Windows and Linux servers since early December. The C2 server is used to host the bash or PowerShell dropper script, a Golang-based binary worm, and the XMRig miner deployed to surreptitiously mine for untraceable Monero cryptocurrency on infected devices.