Security News
The United States is comfortably the world's most powerful nation when measured on "Cyber capabilities that make the greatest difference to national power," according to British think tank The International Institute for Strategic Studies. The report says America's "Capability for offensive cyber operations is probably more developed than that of any other country, although its full potential remains largely undemonstrated".
Chris Inglis was last week appointed America's national cyber director, responsible for coordinating the government's computer security strategy and defending its networks. The United States has been lacking a government computer security chief since President Trump eliminated the position of cybersecurity advisor to the National Security Council in 2018, then held by ex-NSA exploit extraordinaire and Christmas lights enthusiast Rob Joyce.
Volkswagen Group of America this week revealed that approximately 3.3 million people might have been affected in a data breach that impacted both Audi of America and Volkswagen of America. "VWGoA discovered the information at issue included more sensitive personal information on or about May 24, 2021. VWGoA completed the analysis to identify which specific individuals were impacted on or about June 7, 2021," the company said in a letter to the Maine Attorney General.
A banking trojan named Bizarro that originates from Brazil has crossed the borders and started to target customers of 70 banks in Europe and South America. Bizarro is under constant development as its author keeps expanding the list of supporting banks and they modify it to improve anti-analysis protections.
China-linked cyber-espionage group Mustang Panda is targeting telecommunications companies in Asia, Europe, and the United States for espionage purposes, according to a warning from security researchers at McAfee. The new malware attacks, McAfee says, employ the same tactics, techniques and procedures previously associated with Mustang Panda.
Further strengthening its ability to support customers and partners in their digital transformation and migration to cloud, Avaya announced it has appointed Darcey Harrison as Vice President of Cloud Acceleration, North America. Harrison is responsible for continuing expansion of new and existing customer adoption of the Avaya OneCloud communications and collaboration portfolio.
Kia Motors America has suffered a ransomware attack by the DoppelPaymer gang, demanding $20 million for a decryptor and not to leak stolen data. Kia Motors America is headquartered in Irvine, California, and is a Kia Motors Corporation subsidiary.
Kia Motors USA is experiencing a nationwide outage affecting IT servers, self-payment phone services, dealer platforms, and phone support. The outage started Saturday when the Kia Owners Portal went offline and began displaying an error message stating that Kia was "Experiencing an IT service outage that has impacted some internal networks."
uCloudlink is accelerating its global expansion plans with the addition of new business partners in North America. uCloudlink has recently established a partnership with Cello in a move that sets the foundation for its future growth in the region.
The US Dept of Justice will continue pushing for the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday. The decision by prosecutors, working under President Joe Biden, to press on also ignores an appeal made at the start of the week by a coalition of civil-liberties and human-rights groups, who urged the new commander-in-chief to drop the effort to drag Assange to America to face trial after obtaining and distributing classified material, most notably a huge cache of American military and diplomatic documents.