Security News

The menace of Business Email Compromise is often overshadowed by ransomware but it's something small and medium-sized businesses shouldn't lose sight of. Bang on cue, the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center has alerted US businesses to ongoing attacks targeting organisations using Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite.

The extraordinary trial of a former CIA sysadmin accusing of leaking top-secret hacking tools to WikiLeaks has ended in a mistrial. Some of those motions will ask for information from the prosecution that was kept from her during the trial, most controversially the case of "Michael," a co-worker of Schulte who was put on administrative leave by the CIA when evidence emerged linking him to the theft of the Vault 7 hacking tools.

To thwart increasingly dangerous cyber criminals, law enforcement agents are working to "Burn down their infrastructure" and take out the tools that allow them to carry out their devastating attacks, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday. Unsophisticated cyber criminals now have the power to paralyze entire hospitals, businesses and police departments, Wray said during a conference on cybersecurity at Boston College.

Russia wants to watch Americans "Tear ourselves apart" as the United States heads toward elections, an FBI official warned Monday. Porter spoke at an election security conference on Capitol Hill just days after conflicting accounts emerged of a closed-door briefing intelligence officials had given to House lawmakers on threats from Russia and other nations in the 2020 election.

The FBI has arrested a suspect who's charged in connection with waging distributed denial-of-service attacks against the campaign website of an unsuccessful 2018 Democratic candidate for the U.S. House in California. The FBI's criminal complaint in the case claims that Arthur Jan Dam, who lives in California, conducted four DDoS attacks between April 20, 2018, and May 29, 2018, against the campaign website of an unnamed Democratic primary candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in California who ultimately lost.

Cybercrime led to $3.5 billion in losses in the U.S. last year, with a sharp uptick in business email compromise scams - which accounted for nearly half those losses, according to a newly released FBI Internet Crime Report, which is based on complaints the FBI received. The FBI received nearly 24,000 complaints about BEC scams last year, with a total loss of $1.7 billion and an average loss of about $72,000, according to the report.

According to the FBI's 2019 Internet Crime Report, released on Tuesday by the bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total amount of money clawed out of victims through a smorgasbord of cybercrime types just keeps climbing, with 2019 bringing both the highest number of complaints and the highest dollar losses reported since the center was established in May 2000. There were 68,013 people over the age of 60 who reported being victimized last year, and their total reported loss was $835,164,766.

Both the overall number of complaints and the total reported financial losses went up compared to 2018, when IC3 received 351,937 complaints, for a total of $2.7 billion reported losses. The total losses from reported Internet crime over the past five years has surpassed $10.2 billion and the IC3 received a total of 1,707,618 complaints during this period, at an average of more than 340,000 complaints per year.

Businesses and individuals lost $3.5 billion to cybercriminals last year while reporting more incidents of internet crime to the FBI than any year previously, according to the bureau's Internet Core Competency Certification 2019 Internet Crime Report, which was released on Tuesday. People reported 467,361 complaints of cybercrime to the FBI in 2019-an average of nearly 1,300 incidents every day, and more than 100,000 more than the year prior, according to the report.

Russia is still using social media in a sustained campaign to dabble in US affairs, according to FBI director Chris Wray. Wray, speaking at a House Judiciary Hearing on FBI Oversight on Wednesday 5 February, said that Russia is still engaged in an "Information warfare" campaign against the US, according to a report by the Associated Press.