Security News
UK police have arrested a 17-year-old boy suspected of being involved in the 2023 MGM Resorts ransomware attack and a member of the Scattered Spider hacking collective. "We're proud to have assisted law enforcement in locating and arresting one of the alleged criminals responsible for the cyber attack against MGM Resorts and many others," MGM said as part of the law enforcement statement.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which is facing the heat for causing worldwide IT disruptions by pushing out a flawed update to Windows devices, is now warning that threat actors are exploiting the situation to distribute Remcos RAT to its customers in Latin America under the guise of a providing a hotfix. The attack chains involve distributing a ZIP archive file named "Crowdstrike-hotfix.zip," which contains a malware loader named Hijack Loader that, in turn, launches the Remcos RAT payload. Specifically, the archive file also includes a text file with Spanish-language instructions that urges targets to run an executable file to recover from the issue.
Microsoft says a faulty CrowdStrike Falcon update, which caused widespread outages by crashing Windows systems worldwide, also resulted in Windows 365 Cloud PCs getting stuck in reboot loops, rendering them unusable. "We have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows Client and Windows Server, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check and get stuck in a restarting state," Microsoft said on its Service Health Status page.
Law enforcement officials in the U.K. have arrested a 17-year-old boy from Walsall who is suspected to be a member of the notorious Scattered Spider cybercrime syndicate. The teen's arrest, carried out in coordination with the U.K. National Crime Agency and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, comes a little over a month after another 22-year-old member of the e-crime syndicate from the U.K. was apprehended in Spain.
Cops in the UK have arrested a suspected member of the notorious Scattered Spider crime gang, which is accused of crippling MGM Resorts in Las Vegas with ransomware last summer. West Midlands police - along with officials from Britain's National Crime Agency and the FBI - cuffed the 17-year-old, of Walsall, England, on Thursday.
Peru is trying to protect its territorial waters from Chinese squid-fishing boats. Blog moderation policy.
Kettle If you're an IT administrator with Windows boxes on your network, Friday can't have been a lot of fun. What's likely millions of systems were or still are stuck in blue-screen boot loop hell, mostly requiring manual intervention to fix.
MediSecure, an Australian prescription delivery service provider, revealed that roughly 12.9 million people had their personal and health information stolen in an April ransomware attack. At the time, the Australian National Cyber Security Coordinator, who was helping MEdiSecure to mitigate the breach, described it as a "Large-scale ransomware data breach."
The world is 16+ hours into what looks like the biggest IT outage in history, triggered by a defective update for Crowdstrike endpoint security software for Windows machines. Crowdstrike has warned organizations to make sure to communicate with the company's representatives through official channels.
About Bruce Schneier I am a public-interest technologist, working at the intersection of security, technology, and people. I've been writing about security issues on my blog since 2004, and in my monthly newsletter since 1998.