Security News > 2021 > October

Britain's new Information Commissioner has called for video conferencing companies to enable end-to-end encryption on their products - even as police managers and politicians condemn the technology and demand its removal. This week the ICO urged tech companies to make end-to-end encryption "Available to all users" regardless if they're "Enterprise, consumer, paid or free" in a statement jointly backed by seven countries' data protection regulators - even including China.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has charged a man for illegally streaming MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL games via the web and hacking into sports leagues' customer accounts. The charged individual is Joshua Streit, 30, of Minnesota, who allegedly streamed illegal re-broadcasts of major American sports leagues, including the Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, National Football League, and the National Hockey League.

Apple has delivered a barrage of security updates for most of its devices this week, and among the vulnerabilities fixed are CVE-2021-30892, a System Integrity Protection bypass in macOS, and CVE-2021-30883, an iOS flaw that's actively exploited by attackers. A security researcher who analyzed the patch created a POC that worked on iOS 15.0 and iOS 14.7.1, and said it would probably work on earlier versions of the OS. Two weeks later, the fix has finally been included in iOS and iPadOS 14.8.1, tvOS 15.1, and watchOS 8.1.

Microsoft has announced that web content filtering has reached general availability and is now available for all Windows enterprise customers."The Microsoft Defender for Endpoint team is pleased to announce the general availability of web content filtering for our customers on Windows," said Thomas Doucette, a Program Manager at Microsoft.

Since Thursday evening, Google has been investigating reports of customers having issues enrolling their Chromebooks with a network error. According to user reports, "Network not available" errors are displayed on the screen after booting into Chrome OS and trying to enroll the devices.

Europol has announced the arrest of 12 individuals believed to be linked to ransomware attacks against 1,800 victims in 71 countries. According to the law enforcement report, the actors have deployed ransomware strains such as LockerGoga, MegaCortex, and Dharma, as well as malware like Trickbot and post-exploitation tools like Cobalt Strike.

Europol has announced the arrest of 12 individuals believed to be linked to ransomware attacks against 1,800 victims in 71 countries. The most notable case linked to the suspects is a 2019 attack against Norsk Hydro, the Norwegian aluminum production giant, causing severe and lengthy disruption in the company's operations.

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The US Department of Justice claims it's arrested a member of a gang that deployed the Trickbot ransomware. A heavily-redacted indictment names Vladimir Dunaev as a developer of the malware, and alleges he was "a Malware Developer for the Trickbot Group, overseeing the creation of internet browser injection, machine identification, and data harvesting codes used by the Trickbot malware".

In each instance, there are key OT security lessons to be learned, so that other organizations can avoid repeating history. Once Colonial Pipeline knew its IT operations were affected, it chose to proactively take its OT systems offline to prevent the attack from spreading.