Security News
The ADA is a dentist and oral hygiene advocacy association providing training, workshops, and courses to its 175,000 members. On Friday, the ADA suffered a cyberattack that forced them to take affected systems offline, which disrupted various online services, telephones, email, and webchat.
The payment services giant advises that some users may continue to experience issues online or over the phone. The issues reported by users included being unable to log in to their Amex accounts, make payments, or get to an Amex customer service representative over the phone.
Yesterday, American Express users across the world including US, UK, and Europe, experienced widespread outages lasting hours. The issues reported by users included being unable to log in to their Amex accounts, make payments, or get to an Amex customer service representative over the phone.
The US Federal Trade Commission said today that Americans reported losses of more than $5.8 billion to fraud during last year, a massive total increase of over 70% compared to the losses reported in 2020. The FTC added a total of roughly 5.7 million consumer reports to its Consumer Sentinel Network secure online database in 2021.
The number of Chinese-flagged vessels in the south Pacific has surged 13-fold from 54 active vessels in 2009 to 707 in 2020, according to the SPRFMO. Meanwhile, the size of China's squid catch has grown from 70,000 tons in 2009 to 358,000. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.
The US Federal Trade Commission said that Americans reported record high losses of $547 million to romance scams in 2021, up almost 80% compared to 2020 and over six times compared to losses reported in 2017. Financial losses stemming from romance scams have skyrocketed during recent years, with a total of $1.3 billion lost over the past five years.
A number of India-based call centers and their directors have been indicted for their alleged role in placing tens of millions of scam calls aimed at defrauding thousands of American consumers. The indictment charged Manu Chawla, Sushil Sachdeva, Nitin Kumar Wadwani, Swarndeep Singh, Dinesh Manohar Sachdev, Gaje Singh Rathore, Sanket Modi, Rajiv Solanki and their respective call centers for conspiring with previously indicted VoIP provider E Sampark and its director, Guarav Gupta, to forward the calls to U.S. citizens.
As revealed by the FTC, over 95,000 US consumers reported losses of roughly $770 million after getting scammed on social media platforms. "More than one in four people who reported losing money to fraud in 2021 said it started on social media with an ad, a post, or a message. In fact, the data suggest that social media was far more profitable to scammers in 2021 than any other method of reaching people." the FTC said.
The US Federal Trade Commission said Americans reported losing $148 million to gift card scams during the first nine months of 2021, following a significant increase compared to last year. Almost 40,000 consumers reported falling victim to scams where gift cards were the chosen form of payment throughout the year.
The Apple iPhones of at least nine US State Department officials were compromised by an unidentified entity using NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, according to a report published Friday by Reuters. NSO Group in an email to The Register said it has blocked an unnamed customers' access to its system upon receiving an inquiry about the incident but has yet to confirm whether its software was involved.