Security News > 2020 > December

The Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, Maryland was hit by a ransomware attack that impacted computer systems and medical procedures, the healthcare provider said Sunday. The ransomware attack is the latest of many that have impacted healthcare providers over recent months.

Foxconn electronics giant suffered a ransomware attack at a Mexican facility over the Thanksgiving weekend, where attackers stole unencrypted files before encrypting devices. BleepingComputer has been tracking a rumored Foxconn ransomware attack that occurred over the Thanksgiving weekend.

This new malware was discovered by researchers at Dutch cyber-security company Sansec that focuses on defending e-commerce websites from digital skimming attacks. The payment skimmer malware pulls its sleight of hand trick with the help of a double payload structure where the source code of the skimmer script that steals customers' credit cards will be concealed in a social sharing icon loaded as an HTML 'svg' element with a 'path' element as a container.

Human resources giant Randstad last week revealed that its IT systems were targeted in a recent cyberattack involving a relatively new piece of ransomware named Egregor. The cybercriminals behind the Egregor ransomware are known to steal data in addition to using the malware to encrypt the victim's files, in an effort to increase their chances of getting paid.

Microsoft today announced the launch of a new offering for its mission-critical Azure Government cloud targeted at government customers and partners that regularly work with top-secret classified data. "Today, we are announcing the expansion of our mission-critical cloud for US Government with new capabilities in Azure Government, the expansion of Azure Government Secret, and the announcement of a new cloud to serve customers with Top Secret classified data-Azure Government Top Secret," Tom Keane, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Azure Global, said.

NortonLifeLock announced today that they have agreed to acquire Avira in an all-cash transaction for approximately $360 million. Germany-based Avira Operations GmbH has built a large user base of 30 million devices around its freemium model.

The National Security Agency warns that Russian state-sponsored threat actors are exploiting a recently patched VMware vulnerability to steal sensitive information after deploying web shells on vulnerable servers. VMware released security updates to address the security bug on December 3rd after publicly disclosing the vulnerability two weeks ago and providing a temporary workaround that fully removes the attack vector and prevents exploitation.

Network-attached storage maker QNAP today released security updates to address vulnerabilities that could enable attackers to take control of unpatched NAS devices following successful exploitation. The eight vulnerabilities patched today by QNAP affect all QNAP NAS devices running vulnerable software.

Be careful what you wish for when running a hackathon, because one in Australia turned up a data breach in the trove of sample data offered to hackers. Flight Centre thought it had cleaned that dataset so that design jammers could see year of birth, postcode, gender and booking information, but no personal information.

Cybercrime costs the world economy more than $1 trillion, or just more than one percent of global GDP, which is up more than 50 percent from a 2018 study that put global losses at close to $600 billion, McAfee reveals. The theft of intellectual property and monetary assets is damaging, but some of the most overlooked costs of cybercrime come from the damage to company performance.