Security News
Network traffic continues to increase, and global internet bandwidth grew by 29% in 2021, reaching 786 Tbps. In addition to record traffic volumes, 95% of traffic is now encrypted according to Google. To help address these problems, many network security and operations teams are relying more heavily on machine learning technologies to identify faults, anomalies, and threats in network traffic.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and Twitter's new owner, on Thursday called on adding support for end-to-end encryption to the platform's direct messages feature. "Twitter DMs should have end to end encryption like Signal, so no one can spy on or hack your messages," Musk said in a tweet.
A threat brief published by the US Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday paints a grim picture of how Ireland's health service, the HSE, was overwhelmed and had 80% of its systems encrypted during last year's Conti ransomware attack. "The HSE did not have a single responsible owner for cybersecurity, at senior executive or management level at the time of the incident. There was no dedicated committee that provided direction and oversight of cybersecurity and the activities required to reduce the HSE's cyber risk exposure," the HHS Cybersecurity Program said.
A group of hackers claim they breached and encrypted servers belonging to the Belarusian Railway, Belarus's national state-owned railway company. "At the command of the terrorist Lukashenka, Belarusian Railway allows the occupying troops to enter our land," the group said today on Twitter.
Cybersecurity researchers have decoded the mechanism by which the versatile Qakbot banking trojan handles the insertion of encrypted configuration data into the Windows Registry. Although mainly fashioned as an information-stealing malware, Qakbot has since shifted its goals and acquired new functionality to deliver post-compromise attack platforms such as Cobalt Strike Beacon, with the final objective of loading ransomware on infected machines.
Here's the irony of ransomware data breach stories that gets surprisingly little attention: cybercriminals enthusiastically encrypt and steal sensitive data to extort money and yet their victims rarely bother to defend themselves using the same obviously highly effective concept. If sensitive data such as IP are competently encrypted, that not only means that attackers can't access or threaten to leak it, in many cases they won't even be able to see it in the first place - all encrypted data looks alike.
A new analysis of website fingerprinting attacks aimed at the Tor web browser has revealed that it's possible for an adversary to glean a website frequented by a victim, but only in scenarios where the threat actor is interested in a specific subset of the websites visited by users. Tor browser offers "Unlinkable communication" to its users by routing internet traffic through an overlay network, consisting of more than six thousand relays, with the goal of anonymizing the originating location and usage from third parties conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.
The GravityRAT remote access trojan is being distributed in the wild again, this time under the guise of an end-to-end encrypted chat application called SoSafe Chat. In 2020, the malware was targeting people via an Android app named 'Travel Mate Pro,' but since the pandemic has slowed down traveling, the actors moved to a new guise.
WhatsApp is rolling out end-to-end encrypted chat backups on iOS and Android to prevent anyone from accessing your chats, regardless of where they are stored. Currently, WhatsApp allows you to create backups of all your chats and store them on online storage services.
Researchers have discovered a new Python ransomware from an unnamed gang that's striking ESXi servers and virtual machines with what they called "Sniper-like" speed. While the choice of Python for the ransomware is fairly distinctive, going after ESXi servers is anything but.