Security News
An investigation conducted by industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos into the recent cyberattack on the water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, led to the discovery of a watering hole attack that...
An investigation conducted by industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos into the recent cyberattack on the water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, led to the discovery of a watering hole attack that initially appeared to be aimed at water utilities. While investigating the incident, Dragos' threat hunters noticed that the website of a Florida water infrastructure construction company had been compromised and set up to serve as a watering hole.
A campaign by Gov. Ron DeSantis to help Floridians regain ownership of the troves of data that companies collect came to a halt Friday, when state lawmakers could not agree on how tightly to limit how Big Data harvests and uses people's information. Unlike the social media proposal, the legislative effort to address consumer data privacy was mostly bipartisan.
UPDATE. The Conti Gang has demanded a $40 million ransom from a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., school district after a ransomware attack last month. New details have emerged on DataBreaches.net, which recently posted a screenshot of a chat between attackers and a school district official about the sum of money attackers demanded.
An example of this is a recently revealed ransomware attack on the Broward County Public Schools district where threat actors demanded a $40,000,000 payment. According to the Broward County Public Schools website, the school system is the sixth-largest in the USA, with nearly 261,000 students and approximately 110,000 adult students in 241 schools, centers, and technical colleges, and 92 charter schools.
The computer system of one of the nation's largest school districts was hacked by a criminal gang that encrypted district data and demanded $40 million in ransom or it would erase the files and post students' and employees' personal information online. Broward County Public Schools said in a statement Thursday that there is no indication that any personal information has been stolen and that it made no extortion payment to the ransomware gang, which as an apparent pressure tactic last week posted screenshots of its online negotiations with the district to its site on the dark web.
Researchers say they found several stolen and leaked credentials for a Florida water-treatment plant, which was hacked last week. Researchers at CyberNews said they found 11 credential pairs linked to the Oldsmar water plant, in a 2017 compilation of stolen breach credentials.
A water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, was attacked last Friday. Despite its similarities to a Russian attack of a Ukrainian power plant in 2015, my bet is that it's a disgruntled insider: either a current or former employee.
Stories about computer security tend to go viral when they bridge the vast divide between geeks and luddites, and this week's news about a hacker who tried to poison a Florida town's water supply was understandably front-page material. "A supervisor working remotely saw the concentration being changed on his computer screen and immediately reverted it, Gualtieri said. City officials on Monday emphasized that several other safeguards are in place to prevent contaminated water from entering the water supply and said they've disabled the remote-access system used in the attack."
Federal law enforcement is now looking into a cyberattack at a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, FL where someone was able to remotely access systems and add a dangerous amount of chemicals to the town's water supply. On Monday, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri explained during a press conference that an employee at Oldsmar's water treatment facility saw his mouse moving independently of him on Friday morning but thought nothing of it-it's common for people in the field to remotely access systems through their TeamViewer software.