Security News
Israeli spyware maker NSO Group has rubbished Facebook's claim it can be sued in California because it allegedly uses American IT services and has a business presence in the US. Last October, Facebook and its WhatsApp subsidiary sued the software developer and its affiliate Q Cyber Technologies in California, claiming that the firms made, distributed, and operated surveillance software known as Pegasus that remotely infects, hijacks, and extracts data from the smartphones of WhatsApp users. WhatsApp security manager Claudiu Gheorghe in a previous filing identified 720 malicious attacks on WhatsApp from the IP address 104.223.76.220, a server in California provided by QuadraNet and allegedly run by NSO. QuadraNet did not immediately respond to The Register's request to clarify the account holder for that IP address.
The government newspaper of Iran has lost its.com website, with its publisher on Monday accusing the United States of "Stealing" the domain name. Contacted by AFP, Mehdi Shafii, head of the media group that publishes Iran, accused the US Treasury of wanting to "Block" and "Confiscate" the company's domain names.
The US National Security Agency and its Australian counterpart the Australian Signals Directorate have published a set of guidelines to help companies avoid a common kind of attack: web shell exploits. A web shell is a malicious program, often written in a scripting language like PHP or Java Server Pages, that gives an attacker remote access to a system and lets them execute functions on a victim's web server.
If you've had that kind of dangerous misinformation coughed up at you on the platform and have liked, reacted or commented on it, expect to start seeing messages in your newsfeed alerting you and letting you know that Facebook has since removed the effluvium. On Thursday, Guy Rosen, VP of Integrity, said in a post that the messages will be shown to those who've interacted with misinformation that Facebook went on to remove.
As American crude oil crashed on Monday, leading to the bizarre situation of a negative futures contract price, our attention was drawn to a spear-phishing campaign against organizations involved in global oil production. A second, much smaller spear-phishing operation, impersonated a Philippines-based shipping company, targeted oil and gas companies in that country.
The latest company to fall victim to a ransomware attack is Cognizant, a large US IT services company which admitted at the weekend that it had fallen victim to Maze. Cognizant can confirm that a security incident involving our internal systems, and causing service disruptions for some of our clients, is the result of a Maze ransomware attack.
Know anything about North Korean hackers and their activities in cyberspace, past or ongoing? North Korean cyber actors are allegedly behind extortion campaigns, including both ransomware and mobster-like protection rackets.
New research from Atlas VPN has shown that the United States experienced more than 175,000 DDoS attacks in the month of March, more than double the number faced by the next highest country and four times as many as China. According to data gathered and analyzed by Atlas VPN researchers, South Korea and Brazil both suffered from more than 50,000 DDoS attacks while China came in just ahead of the United Kingdom with about 45,000 attacks.
Successful COVID-19-themed fraud attempts perpetrated in the US, since the beginning of the year resulted in a little over $13 million losses, the Federal Trade Commission has shared. Despite repeated alerts from a variety of sources - the FBI, the FTC, the FCC - US citizens continue to fall for COVID-19-themed scams.
The US government's Computer Emergency Response Team has posted a new report on the latest exploits of North Korea's Hidden Cobra hacking crews. The updated advisory details how the hacking groups believed to operate on behalf of the isolated government, have carried out various hacking operations in recent years in an effort to drum up cash for the sanctions-hit regime.