Security News

GitHub explains the cause behind the past week's outages
2022-03-24 14:55

GitHub says recent service outages were caused by resource contention issues in their primary database cluster. Since last week, GitHub says that there were four service outages caused by these problems, on March 16th, March 17th, March 22nd, and March 23rd. Today, GitHub explained that these outages were caused by "Resource contention" issues with their primary MySQL cluster called 'MySQL1.

IT outage at Scotland's Heriot-Watt University enters second week
2022-03-24 09:30

Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University has entered a second week of woe following a vist by an infosec nasty. The 200-year-old institution's IT team first referred to the crisis as a "Security incident" but a spokesperson confirmed to The Register that it was a cyber attack.

Europe warns of aircraft GPS outages tied to Russian invasion
2022-03-17 16:28

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency, EU's air transport safety and environmental protection regulator, warned today of intermittent outages affecting Global Navigation Satellite Systems linked to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These GNSS outages can lead to navigation and surveillance degradation due to jamming and/or possible spoofing issues that have intensified around Ukraine.

Canada's major banks go offline in mysterious hours-long outage
2022-02-17 06:58

Five major Canadian banks went offline for hours blocking access to online and mobile banking as well as e-transfers for customers. The banks hit by the outage include Royal Bank of Canada, BMO, Scotiabank, TD Bank Canada, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

GitHub outage impacts Actions, Codespaces, Issues, Pull Requests
2022-02-02 19:27

GitHub was down today, affected by a worldwide outage preventing access to the website, issuing commits, cloning projects, or performing pull requests. The outage started at approximately 2:15 PM EST, with the website responding with HTTP 500 error codes, as shown below.

Major Discord outage caused by API and database issues
2022-01-26 20:27

The outage started at 2:49 PM EST and was initially caused by an issue with the application programming interface outage, preventing various services from communicating with each other. After resolving the API issue, Discord discovered a secondary issue with a database cluster, causing further problems.

Major Discord API outage prevents logins and voice chats
2022-01-26 20:27

Discord is suffering a 'massive outage' preventing users from logging in to the service or using voice chats. The outage started at 2:49 PM EST and was originally caused by a widespread API outage.

Umbrella company Parasol Group confirms cyber attack as 'root cause' of prolonged network outage
2022-01-17 13:28

Umbrella company Parasol Group has confirmed why it shut down part of its IT last week: it found unauthorised activity from an intruder. Tech freelancers suspected a cyberattack was to blame for the blackout and sure enough the Group wrote to customers at the close of last working week to explain in more detail what had happened.

Multi-day IT systems outage whacks umbrella biz Parasol Group amid fears of a cyber attack
2022-01-14 16:30

Contractors employed via umbrella company Parasol Group are increasingly nervous about a multi-day outage of some IT systems used to process payroll, with several suspecting a security attack as the root cause. Greet Borsens, the chief sales officer at Parasol Group, itself part of Optionis Group, wrote to its contractor customers on 12 January confirming "a systems outage in parts of our group" affecting the MyParasol portal.

FinalSite: No school data stolen in ransomware attack behind site outages
2022-01-10 23:32

FinalSite announced today the findings of a six-day investigation into last week's ransomware attack, stating it found no evidence schools' data accessed or stolen by hackers. After a six-day investigation, FinalSite states that they have determined what ransomware gang performed the attack and how they gained access to their network but would not be disclosing their names due to ongoing investigations.