Security News
Users of Monzo, one of the UK's most popular digital-only banking platforms, are being targeted by phishing messages supported by a growing network of malicious websites. Monzo is a 100% online banking platform with over four million customers and among the first to challenge the traditional financial managing system.
Metaverse companies face 60% more attacks last year, and 5 other online fraud statistics. By its reckoning, 21% of all online traffic was fraud or cyberattack related, one in four new account registrations were fake, 80% of all login attacks were credential stuffing attempts and the travel industry was hit particularly hard, with a 12.5 time increase in attacks as people return to traveling.
American football team the San Francisco 49ers have been hit by ransomware, with the criminals responsible claiming to have stolen corporate data and threatened to publish it. Calling itself Blackbyte, the ransomware gang responsible published samples of stolen documents on a dark web blog over the weekend, as seen by The Register.
"From the earliest days of online information to the rapid evolution of today's metaverses, the internet has come a long way. However, this latest data shows that it is more under attack than ever before," said Arkose Labs CEO Kevin Gosschalk. The latest research took a deep dive into UK business specifically to understand which sectors were the most attacked by online criminals.
What appears to be stolen data belonging to customers of accounting conglomerate Optionis Group has surfaced on the dark web weeks after the firm confirmed intruders had broken into its systems. The Vice Society ransomware gang dumped what appears to be thousands of files onto their dark web blog as downloadable links, as seen by The Register.
Even think tanks with close links to the UK's Conservative government are now criticising the Online Safety Bill, with the Institute of Economic Affairs describing it today as "a significant threat to freedom of speech, privacy and innovation." The IEA, which tends to side with free-market conservatives, said today that the controversial legislation needs an independent reviewer to prevent it causing harms to people using the internet in Britain.
A team of researchers from French, Israeli, and Australian universities has explored the possibility of using people's GPUs to create unique fingerprints and use them for persistent web tracking. The researchers considered the possibility of creating distinctive fingerprints based on the GPU of the tracked systems with the help of WebGL. WebGL is a cross-platform API for rendering 3D graphics in the browser, and it's present on all modern web browsers.
The amount of time devices running Windows are powered on and connected to Windows Update is tracked by Microsoft as 'Update Connectivity. "One of the most impactful things we explored was how much time a device needs to be powered on and connected to Windows Update to be able to successfully install quality and feature updates," said Guyer.
Britain's controversial Online Safety Bill will leave Britons more exposed to internet harms than ever before, the Internet Society has said, while data from other countries suggests surveillance mostly isn't used to target child abusers online, despite this being a key cited rationale of linked measures. Government efforts to depict end-to-end encryption as a harm that needs to be designed out of the internet as it exists today will result in "Fraud and online harm" increasing, the Internet Society said this week.
The British government's PR campaign to destroy popular support for end-to-end encryption on messaging platforms has kicked off, under the handle "No Place To Hide", and it's as broad as any previous attack on the safety-guaranteeing technology. Judging by videos earnestly distributed by organisations supporting it, the No Place To Hide campaign is much wider than merely targeting Facebook Messenger as was previously thought.