Security News
Think carefully about cyber insurance, says NCSC. But don't worry about buying off ransomware crooks
The National Cyber Security Centre has urged British businesses to think carefully when picking a cyber insurance policy - but won't say whether insurance that covers ransomware payoffs is a bad thing or not. Taking the form of seven questions for businesses published on the NCSC website, the latest guidance urges companies to ponder security-specific things when deciding what insurance policy to take out.
Canon pulled the plug on service, and restored it days later, on Tuesday, August 4 when the data-gobbling glitch was fixed, we're told. According to Bleeping Computer, Canon was hit by a Maze ransomware infection.
The NetWalker ransomware has been around for about a year, but it has really made a name for itself in 2020, racking up around $29 million in extortion gains just since March. A recent FBI Alert warned that NetWalker ransomware attackers are now targeting U.S. and foreign government organizations.
Law enforcement in Belarus has announced the arrest of a 31-year-old man who is alleged to have extorted more than 1000 victims with the infamous GandCrab ransomware in 2017 and 2018. Used GandCrab malware variants to conduct ransomware attacks.
Federal authorities say one of the gravest threats to the November election is a well-timed ransomware attack that could paralyze voting operations. "We're seeing state and local entities targeted with ransomware on a near daily basis," said Geoff Hale, a top election security official with Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Garmin, the GPS and aviation tech specialist, reportedly negotiated with Evil Corp for an decryption key to unlock its files in the wake of a WastedLocker ransomware attack. Sources reportedly shared photos with BleepingComputer of a Garmin computer with encrypted files with the.
"We discovered and stopped a sophisticated attempted ransomware attack," Blackbaud CEO Michael Gianoni has told financial analysts - failing to mention the company simply paid off criminal extortionists to end the attack. As we reported, Blackbaud paid a demanded ransom back in May before quietly notifying the world two months later.
According to reports, Minnesota-based business travel company CWT is the latest victim of the latest trend in ransomware. We're probably at the point where we need to stop calling them just "Ransomware" attacks, because it's increasingly common that there's a lot more to these attacks than just locking you out of your files, which is how we usually think of ransomware.
US corporate travel management firm Carlson Wagonlit Travel has suffered an intrusion and it is believed the company paid a $4.5m ransom to get its data back. The ransomware, a relatively new strain first seen late last year, deploys a Windows XP virtual machine onto the target network in order to unleash the ransomware itself.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation this week released an alert to warn businesses of ongoing cyberattacks involving the NetWalker ransomware. "As of June 2020, the FBI has received notifications of NetWalker ransomware attacks on U.S. and foreign government organizations, education entities, private companies, and health agencies by unidentified cyber actors," the FBI's alert reads.