Security News
Chinese nation-state hackers have been linked to an attack on the Parliament of Finland that took place last year and led to the compromise of some parliament email accounts. "Some parliament e-mail accounts may have been compromised as a result of the attack, among them e-mail accounts that belong to MPs," Parliament officials said at the time.
Email security biz Mimecast has dumped SolarWinds' network monitoring tool in favour of Cisco's Netflow product after falling victim to the infamous December supply chain attack. In an incident report detailing its experiences of the SolarWinds compromise, Mimecast said it had "Decommissioned SolarWinds Orion and replaced it with an alternative NetFlow monitoring system".
Chile's Comisión para el Mercado Financiero has disclosed that their Microsoft Exchange server was compromised through the recently disclosed ProxyLogon vulnerabilities. "The analyzes carried out by the information security and technology area of the CMF, together with external specialized support, have so far dismissed the presence of a ransomware and indicate that the incident would be limited to the Microsoft Exchange platform," disclosed the Comisión para el Mercado Financiero.
A Florida teenager accused of masterminding a Twitter hack of celebrity accounts in a crypto currency scheme has been sentenced to three years in juvenile prison in a plea agreement, officials said. State prosecutors announced the deal Tuesday in the case of Graham Ivan Clark, 18, described as the mastermind of the July 2020 "Bit-Con" worldwide hack of Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and others.
A Florida teen accused of masterminding the hacks of several high-profile Twitter accounts last summer as part of a widespread cryptocurrency scam pled guilty to fraud charges in exchange for a three-year prison sentence. On July 15, 2020, Twitter suffered one of the biggest security lapses in its history after the attackers managed to hijack nearly 130 high-profile Twitter accounts pertaining to politicians, celebrities, and musicians, including that of Barack Obama, Kanye West, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Uber, and Apple.
A 17-year-old high school senior along with her mother, Laura Rose Carroll, were arrested this week, charged with accessing student records in a fraudulent attempt to rig her school's Homecoming Queen election. The same district where her daughter attended Tate High School, the Washington Post reported.
The emergency patches for the recently disclosed critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange email server did not come soon enough and organizations had little time to prepare before en masse exploitation began. With patches released and proof-of-concept exploit code surfacing online, thousands of Microsoft Exchange servers worldwide continue to remain vulnerable and the number of attacks is still at a worrying level.
Swiss authorities on Monday confirmed a police raid at the home of a Swiss software engineer who took credit for helping to break into a U.S. security-camera company's online networks, part of what the activist hacker cited as an effort to raise awareness about the dangers of mass surveillance. The Federal Office of Justice said regional police in central Lucerne, acting on a legal assistance request from U.S. authorities, on Friday carried out a house search involving hacker Tillie Kottmann.
Veracode announced the launch of the Veracode Hacker Games. The two-week collegiate competition will challenge computer science and cybersecurity student teams from eight leading universities across the U.S. and the U.K., including University of Virginia, Tufts and University of Warwick, to test their secure coding skills and give them the opportunity to win individual prizes, plus $15,000 in charitable donations for the top universities.
The Biden administration is not planning to step up government surveillance of the U.S. internet even as state-backed foreign hackers and cybercriminals increasingly use it to evade detection, a senior administration official said Friday. The official said the administration, mindful of the privacy and civil liberties implications that could arise, is not currently seeking additional authority to monitor U.S.-based networks.