Security News
TransUnion's latest analysis of global online fraud trends found that since the COVID-19 pandemic began, fraudsters are increasing their rate of digital schemes against businesses. A recent study found that more than one in three global consumers have recently been targeted by digital fraud related to COVID-19.
Documents related to the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine were illegally accessed during a cyberattack at the EU regulator, the company said Wednesday, as Germany and other northern hemisphere countries grappled with a winter surge in the pandemic. While the EMA did not give details on the attack, Pfizer and BioNTech said documents relating to their vaccine candidate had been accessed, but that "No systems have been breached in connection with this incident."
The UK's data privacy watchdog on Friday slashed a fine imposed on British Airways over a cyber attack after taking into account coronavirus fallout on the embattled airline's finances. The UK Information Commissioner's Office said BA would be fined a "Record" £20 million, considerably less that the proposed amount totalling £183 million.
De Guzman was poor, and internet access was expensive. He felt that getting online was almost akin to a human right.
Turkey's coronavirus tracking app is facing fire from privacy advocates for adding a feature allowing users to report social distancing rule violations, with the option to send photos. In April, the health ministry launched a phone app called "Hayat Eve Sigar" that helps people monitor confirmed virus cases, showing the risk levels and infection rates in specific neighbourhoods.
A previously misfiring smartphone app to help track transmission of the coronavirus will be trialled again in parts of England following two months of troubleshooting, the government said on Thursday. The updated version of the tracing app will undergo renewed trials on the Isle of Wight, off the southern English coast, and among health volunteers nationwide, ahead of further tests in an east London district.
"[The] FBI has high confidence that Chinese government actors are using malware variants in conjunction with proxy servers to maintain a presence on victim networks and to further network exploitation," the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Defense said in a joint advisory. The US Cyber Command has also uploaded four samples of the Taidoor RAT on the public malware repository VirusTotal to let 50+ Antivirus companies check the virus's involvement in other unattributed campaigns.
Face masks not only have shown in research to slow the spread of COVID-19, they also deter facial-recognition technology from correctly identifying people, according to a new study. New research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that even the best of 89 commercial facial recognition algorithms tested experienced error rates between 5 percent and 50 percent when matching people in digitally applied face masks with photos of the same person without a mask.
Russian intelligence services are using a trio of English-language websites to spread disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, seeking to exploit a crisis that America is struggling to contain ahead of the presidential election in November, U.S. officials said Tuesday. Two Russians who have held senior roles in Moscow's military intelligence service known as the GRU have been identified as responsible for a disinformation effort meant to reach American and Western audiences, U.S. government officials said.
Britain, the United States and Canada on Thursday accused a hacking group called APT29 of spearheading the online attacks on various organisations involved in COVID-19 vaccine development. Moscow quickly rejected the accusations as "Groundless", and its ambassador to London said in a British television interview Sunday the claims made "No sense".