Security News
The United States has pinned the blame on Russia for a devastating cyberattack campaign that has hit government agencies and corporations across the country. In a joint statement, the agencies said that the work "Indicates that an Advanced Persistent Threat actor, likely Russian in origin, is responsible for most or all of the recently discovered, ongoing cyber compromises of both government and non-governmental networks." Further, the group said it believes the incident was designed as an intelligence gathering effort, which means a surveillance operation aimed at finding confidential and sensitive information.
According to new findings from Check Point Software, healthcare organizations have seen a 45-percent increase in cyberattacks since November, which is more than double other industry sectors, with an average 22-percent increase. Researchers said these attacks include botnets, remote code execution and DDoS, but it's ransomware that's really become the weapon-of-choice against healthcare organizations.
The United States Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has issued an alert to warn financial institutions of fraud and cyberattacks related to COVID-19 vaccines. In its newly released alert, FinCEN tells financial institutions to be wary of "Potential for fraud, ransomware attacks, or similar types of criminal activity related to COVID-19 vaccines and their distribution."
The Voyager cryptocurrency brokerage platform halted trading yesterday after suffering a cyberattack targeting their DNS configuration. Voyager Digital LLC is a cryptocurrency broker that allows investors to trade assets using the Voyager mobile app.
A Vermont-based hospital network is now saying a cyberattack that crippled its computer systems in October was ransomware. While the Burlington-based University of Vermont Health Network, which serves hospitals in Vermont and upstate New York, had said its systems were attacked on Oct. 28, officials had not confirmed the attack that disabled the system's 600 applications was ransomware.
President-elect Joe Biden said Tuesday that the perpetrators of a massive cyberattack on the US government, unofficially blamed on Russia, must face consequences, and assailed President Donald Trump over his response to the threat. "We can't let this go unanswered," Biden said in pre-holiday remarks to the American people.
Roanoke College has delayed their spring semester by almost a month after a cyberattack has impacted files and data access. Roanoke College is a private liberal arts college located in Salem, Virginia, with approximately 2,000 students.
How can and should governments respond to and better protect themselves from serious cyberattacks from hostile nations? The attackers who exploited a security flaw in SolarWinds' Orion network monitoring software to breach government agencies and large companies were almost certainly acting on behalf of a nation-state.
Hackers broke into systems used by top US Treasury officials during a massive cyberattack on government agencies and may have stolen essential encryption keys, a senior lawmaker said Monday. Senator Ron Wyden, who sits on both the Senate Intelligence and Finance Committees, said after a closed-door briefing that the hack at the US Treasury Department "Appears to be significant."
While analyzing artifacts from the SolarWinds Orion supply-chain attack, security researchers discovered another backdoor that is likely from a second threat actor. The analysis shows that the threat actor added in the legitimate SolarWinds file four new parameters to receive signals from the command and control infrastructure.