Security News

The Greek government said Friday that the official state websites of the prime minister, the national police and fire service and several important ministries were briefly disabled by a cyberattack but have been restored. Government spokesman Stelios Petsas said early Friday that the distributed denial-of-service or DDoS attack "Led to the malfunction of certain websites." He said "Countermeasures" had been successfully implemented, but gave no further details.

Small and midsized businesses sometimes lack the internal skills and staff to fully handle their cybersecurity, prompting them to outsource their security protection to channel partners. Though such partners are increasingly adding security to the mix of services they offer, businesses can still be vulnerable to cyberattack due to certain internal limitations and barriers.

A cyberattack targeting one of the largest banks in the U.S. that stops the processing of payments likely would have a major ripple effect throughout the financial system, according to a new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The impact of a cyberattack would increase if the banks strategically responded by not sending out payments and hoarding their money and assets, which the study says is likely.

Cloudflare, the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, announced it will be offering free security services to help political campaigns in the United States and around the world defend against cyberattacks and election interference. Separate from these projects, Cloudflare provided services to 16 of the 17 2016 U.S. Presidential campaigns and has provided service to 18 of the 32 2020 U.S. Presidential campaigns.

Organizations should long ago have put in place multifactor authentication and a breach response plan and continued to actively shore up any defenses that are lagging. Here's the U.S. government once again warning organizations that support critical infrastructure to do the basics.

GCHQ and its cyber-defence offshoot NCSC have both denied that they are investigating a cyber-attack on the London Stock Exchange, contrary to reports. "The incident," the newspaper claimed, "Which delayed the market open by more than an hour and a half and was the worst outage in eight years, immediately triggered government cyber alert systems, according to the people familiar with the matter."

GCHQ and its cyber-defence offshoot NCSC have both denied that they are investigating a cyber-attack on the London Stock Exchange, contrary to reports. "The incident," the newspaper claimed, "Which delayed the market open by more than an hour and a half and was the worst outage in eight years, immediately triggered government cyber alert systems, according to the people familiar with the matter."

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has issued warnings about the possibility of cyberattacks launched by Iran in response to the United States killing Qassem Soleimani, a top Iranian military commander. While many - including U.S. officials - have criticized the decision to kill the leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force unit, Washington justified its actions by claiming that Soleimani had been planning an imminent attack on U.S. interests in the Middle East.

Iran's retaliation for the United States' targeted killing of its top general is likely to include cyberattacks, security experts warned Friday. A top U.S. cybersecurity official is warning businesses and government agencies to be extra vigilant.

Iran's response to the recent U.S. airstrike that killed Qassem Soleimani, a senior Iranian military commander, could include cyberattacks, and organizations should be prepared to prevent and respond to attacks, cybersecurity professionals have warned. Tensions between the United States and Iran escalated following Soleimani's death and Iran has vowed revenge.