Security News
The Dutch police announced the arrest of three individuals in connection with a "Large-scale" criminal operation involving data theft, extortion, and money laundering. The Politie said its cybercrime team started the investigation nearly two years ago, in March 2021, after a large Dutch company suffered a security breach.
Dutch police have arrested three men for their alleged involvement with a ransomware gang that stole sensitive data and extorted hundreds of thousands of euros from thousands of companies. According to the Amsterdam police cybercrime team, the investigation began in March 2021 after a large Dutch company reported a case of data theft that had come accompanied by a ransom demand.
The Amsterdam cybercrime police team has arrested three men for ransomware activity that generated €2.5 million from extorting small and large organizations in multiple countries. The extortion involved threats of leaking the data or destroying the company's digital infrastructure.
The Public Prosecution Service in the Netherlands has just released information about an unnamed suspect arrested back in December 2022 for allegedly stealing and selling personal data about tens of millions of people. The suspect is being investigated for multiple offences: possessing or publishing "Non-public" data, possessing phishing software and hacking tools, computer hacking, and money laundering.
The Dutch police have arrested a 19-year-old man in western Netherlands, suspected of breaching the systems of a healthcare software vendor in the country, and stealing tens of thousands of documents. These documents might contain sensitive personal and medical data of patients of healthcare providers using the company's systems.
You paste the hexadecimal code from the BTC transaction into the ransomware "Login page", and the process fires up a decryption program left behind by the crooks that unscrambles all your data. Loosely speaking, once Bitcoin miners see that a not-yet-processed transaction involves funds that someone else has already "Mined", they simply stop working on the unfinished transaction, on the grounds that it's now worthless to them.
Dutch authorities have arrested a software developer suspected of working with Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixing service that only two days earlier was sanctioned by the US government for allegedly laundering money for ransomware operators and other cybercriminals. The move against Tornado Cash came three months after similar sanctions were place on another crypto mixer, Blender.io.
The Dutch Ministry of Education has decided to partially suspend the use of Chrome OS and Chrome web browser until August 2023 over concerns about data privacy. Since the national watchdog doesn't know where students' personal data is stored and processed, there are concerns about the violation of the European Union's GDPR. The Minister of Education and the Minister of Primary and Secondary Education have co-signed a letter to the Dutch parliament where they describe a range of cybersecurity and data protection matters.
The Netherlands' Maastricht University has managed to recoup the Bitcoin ransom it paid to ransomware scum in 2019 - and has made a tidy profit on the deal. The University explained that in 2019 it suffered a ransomware attack that prevented staff and students from accessing research data, email, or library resources.
Between October and December 2021, an independent research company surveyed over 3,000 IT decision makers and IT professionals about their IT and data protection strategies, challenges and drivers. Almost all the respondents were from organizations with more than 1,000 employees - from 28 different countries.