Security News
PornHub has now added Texas to its blocklist, preventing users in the state from accessing its site in protest of age verification laws. The bill requires adult sites showing sexual material to perform age verification to confirm a visitor from Texas is 18 years old.
Faculty and students at the University of Texas at Austin this week became the latest members of a public US university to lose access to Chinese video app TikTok via campus networks. According to Neyland's email, the ban puts the university in compliance with a December directive issued by state governor Greg Abbott.
Instead, it's remembered as the weekend of the infamous Kaseya ransomware attack. In other words, the crooks used Kaseya's infrastructure to disseminate and detonate ransomware infections on Kaseya's customers' computers, combining two security weaknesses to spread their malware much more widely than if they had attacked Kaseya alone.
Texas communities struggled for days with disruptions to core government services as workers in small cities and towns endured a cascade of frustrations brought on by the sophisticated cyberattack, according to thousands of pages of documents reviewed by The Associated Press and interviews with people involved in the response. In Borger, a city of fewer than 13,000, early indications were worrisome as the city raced to shut down its computers.
Rob Robinson, client partner in utilities practice for Capgemini, talks with TechRepublic about what the catastrophic outages in Texas should teach us about predicting threats to U.S. the power grid.
I think what you're going to see is that in the normal band of operation, I think, not just in Texas, but around the country, there's a lot of scenario planning, there's a lot of analytics that are present and used up from real-time, what they call, state estimation and situational wellness to situational awareness all the way to 20-year modeling to keep this grid stable. I think it's going to be a combination of modeling, not just the power grid, but the gas grid, of that water infrastructure-there's a whole huge behavioral modeling frontier that's going to be opened up.
Texas electric utility Austin Energy today warned of unknown individuals impersonating the company and threatening customers over the phone that their power will be cut off unless they pay fictitious overdue bills. During these ongoing scam attempts, the scammers warn the customers that their utilities will be disconnected if they don't make immediate payments, "Typically using a reloadable prepaid debit card or other non-traceable form of payment."
Tech giant Oracle Corp. said Friday it will move its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas, and let many employees choose their office locations and decide whether to work from home. "We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work," the company said in a regulatory filing.
The company's response was less than solid gold - it took months to notify its users of the breach. In a notice sent to its online customers, the company said that it became aware of suspicious activity on its website on July 6.
Tyler C. King, a 31-year-old from Dallas, Texas, was sentenced this week to 57 months in prison for crimes related to the hacking of an unnamed major tech company based in New York. According to the Justice Department, King gained access to the technology firm's systems in 2015 with the help of Ashley St. Andria, who at the time was an employee of the company.