Security News > 2022
Today, the Russian government announced that they arrested fourteen members of the REvil ransomware gang on behalf of US authorities. While the ransomware gang members are only being charged with "Illegal circulation of means of payment," the arrests are the first public action by Russia to stem the activities of ransomware gangs operating within the country.
No fewer than 70 websites operated by the Ukrainian government went offline on Friday for hours in what appears to be a coordinated cyber attack amid heightened tensions with Russia. "As a result of a massive cyber attack, the websites of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a number of other government agencies are temporarily down," Oleg Nikolenko, MFA spokesperson, tweeted.
Ukrainian police authorities have nabbed five members of a gang that's believed to have helped orchestrate attacks against more than 50 companies across Europe and the U.S and caused losses to the tune of more than $1 million. The Cyber Police of the National Police of Ukraine said the group offered a "Hacker service" that enabled financially motivated crime syndicates to send phishing emails containing file-encrypted malware to lock confidential data pertaining to its victims, demanding that the targets pay cryptocurrency ransoms in return for restoring access to the files.
An Iranian state-sponsored actor has been observed scanning and attempting to abuse the Log4Shell flaw in publicly-exposed Java applications to deploy a hitherto undocumented PowerShell-based modular backdoor dubbed "CharmPower" for follow-on post-exploitation. Log4Shell aka CVE-2021-44228 concerns a critical security vulnerability in the popular Log4j logging library that, if successfully exploited, could lead to remote execution of arbitrary code on compromised systems.
The researchers from the FAS Center for Systems Biology discovered a network of genes important in squid eye development that are known to also play a crucial role in limb development across animals, including vertebrates and insects. The scientists say these genes have been repurposed in squid to make camera-lens-type eyes.
With FDE, everything gets encrypted, including unused parts of the disk, deleted sectors, filenames, swapfile data, the apps you're using, the operating system files you've installed, and even the disk space you've deliberately zeroed out to forcibly overwrite what was there before. Did you use the right cryptographic algorithm? Did you generate the encryption keys reliably? Did you handle the issue of data integrity properly? Can you change passwords safely and quickly? How easy is it to lock yourself out by mistake? What if you want to adjust the encryption parameters as your corporate policies evolve?
The January 2022 Windows Server cumulative updates are once again available via Windows Update after being pulled yesterday without an official reason from Microsoft. After Windows admins installed the updates, some found that it caused their Windows Servers to go into boot loops, ReFS volumes to become inaccessible, and Hyper-V not to start.
The January 2022 Windows Server cumulative updates are once again available via Windows Update after being pulled yesterday without an official reason from Microsoft. After Windows admins installed the updates, some found that it caused their Windows Servers to go into boot loops, ReFS volumes to become inaccessible, and Hyper-V not to start.
American nonprofit Goodwill has disclosed a data breach that affected the accounts of customers using its ShopGoodwill.com e-commerce auction platform. ShopGoodwill's Vice President Ryan Smith said in data breach notification letters sent to impacted individuals that some of their personal contact information was exposed due to a site vulnerability.
Russia's internal security agency said today it had dismantled the REvil ransomware gang's networks and raided its operators' homes following arrests yesterday in Ukraine. Only yesterday five ransomware suspects were arrested in Ukraine, though their gang affiliations were not revealed by local police.