Security News

Bug bounty hunters have earned a total of more than $1.2 million over the weekend at the 2020 Tianfu Cup International PWN Contest, a major hacking competition that takes place every year in China. The winner was a team representing Chinese cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360, which earned over $740,000.

In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. In it, he noted [PDF] that in three years, the optimal cost per component on a chip had dropped by a factor of 10, while the optimal number had increased by the same factor, from 10 to 100.

Starting on Friday, US high school students can register to participate in CyberStart America, an online puzzle-solving game designed to identify cybersecurity talent and qualify participants for an opportunity to compete in the National Cyber Scholarship Competition next year. The CyberStart America program, sponsored by the National Cyber Scholarship Foundation, aims to find students with an affinity for security-oriented challenges in the hope of steering them toward careers defending US organizations.

The virtual edition of the HITBCyberWeek 2020 security conference starts on November 15. Simultaneously, those in search for specific cyber security knowledge and effective exercises can opt for one of the virtual trainings that have been scheduled to take place.

In a joint statement, the U.S. government is warning the healthcare industry that a hacking group is actively targeting hospitals and healthcare providers in Ryuk ransomware attacks. On this call, the U.S. government warned healthcare providers that Ryuk ransomware is actively targeting the healthcare industry and that proper steps should be taken to secure their systems.

Hackers seeking to sow chaos in the November 3 election are hard at work - but some experts say they don't need to be successful to have an impact. Simply the perception of breaching election systems could have the same effect of undermining confidence in the outcome and opening the door to discrediting the results.

Finland's interior minister summoned key Cabinet members into an emergency meeting Sunday after hundreds - and possibly thousands - of patient records at a private Finnish psychotherapy center were accessed by a hacker or hackers now demanding ransoms. Vastaamo, which has branches throughout the Nordic country of 5.5 million and operates as a sub-contractor for Finland's public health system, said its client register with intimate patient information was likely stolen during two attacks that started almost two years ago.

This week: the DOJ's attempt to reignite the Battle to Break Encryption; the story of the Russian hackers behind the Sandworm Team; a zero-day bug just patched in Chrome; and why your vocabulary needs the word "Restore" even more than it needs "Backup". WHERE TO FIND THE PODCAST ONLINE. You can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast and anywhere that good podcasts are found.

The NSA released an advisory listing the top twenty-five known vulnerabilities currently being exploited by Chinese nation-state attackers. This advisory provides Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures known to be recently leveraged, or scanned-for, by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors to enable successful hacking operations against a multitude of victim networks.

The Kremlin on Tuesday denied US claims that Russian military intelligence was behind cyber attacks targeting Ukraine's power grid, the 2017 French election and the 2018 Winter Olympic Games. President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov described US charges against six Russian intelligence officers as "Rampant Russophobia which, of course, have nothing to do with reality."