Security News
Cheeky clothing firm French Connection, also known as FCUK, has become the latest victim of ransomware, with a gang understood to be linked to REvil having penetrated its back-end - making off with a selection of private internal data. Founded in 1972 by current chief executive Stephen Marks, French Connection made a name for itself when it adopted the not-actually-rude-honest slogan "FCUK" in its advertising in the early 2000s.
Prosecutors have charged four executives at two French companies accused of aiding Libya's former strongman Moamer Kadhafi and Egyptian authorities to spy on opposition figures who were later detained and tortured, a rights group said Tuesday. The former chief of Amesys, Philippe Vannier, was charged in Paris last week with "Complicity in acts of torture," according to the International Federation of Human Rights, which was confirmed by judicial sources.
Russian Alexander Vinnik, jailed last year for money laundering, begins an appeal at a Paris court Tuesday, as prosecutors challenge his acquittal on charges that he masterminded massive ransomware attacks. While a lower court in December sentenced him to five years in jail for money laundering, it acquitted Vinnik, 41, of 13 out of 14 charges of cyber piracy.
Thales has been selected by the French Ministry of the Interior to deliver several hundred pre-registration kiosks at various border crossing points. France will be equipped with a biometric solution to streamline and secure its air, land and sea border crossings.
A hospital in southwest France has seen some of its IT systems paralysed by a "Ransomware" cyberattack, its management said Tuesday, the third such incident in the last month. Hospital workers have had to revert to working with pens and paper, since digital patient records are not available.
Here in France, we've just experienced the country's biggest ever data breach of customer records, involving some half a million medical patients. Data journalism couldn't be easier, and indeed the newspaper hacks have been on the beat, contacting the doctors listed in the file and phoning up some of the patients on their mobile numbers to ask how they feel about the data breach.
Russia-linked state-sponsored threat actor known as Sandworm has been linked to a three-year-long stealthy operation to hack targets by exploiting an IT monitoring tool called Centreon. The intrusion campaign - which breached "Several French entities" - is said to have started in late 2017 and lasted until 2020, with the attacks particularly impacting web-hosting providers, said the French information security agency ANSSI in an advisory.
A major French software firm allegedly targeted by Russian hackers denied Tuesday that its major clients could have been affected by the attack. Centreon, which lists blue-chip French firms from Airbus to Total among its users, was named in a report by the French national cybersecurity agency ANSSI late Monday.
The French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems is publicly blaming the notorious Sandworm APT group for a series of long-term hacking attacks against multiple IT and web hosting shops in Europe. According to a technical advisory released by ANSSI, the data breaches date back to 2017 and include the eyebrow-raising compromise of Centreon, an IT monitoring software provider widely embedded throughout government organizations in France.
A joint operation between French and Ukrainian law enforcement has reportedly led to the arrests of several members of the Egregor ransomware operation in Ukraine. The arrested individuals are thought to be Egregor affiliates whose job was to hack into corporate networks and deploy the ransomware.