Security News

The abrupt move of millions of people to working remotely has sparked an unprecedented volume of attacks to trick people into giving up credentials to attackers, according to security researchers. The pandemic has created a perfect storm for cyberattacks, with millions of people working in unfamiliar, less secure circumstances and eager for information about the virus and new organizational policies being implemented.

As the world tackles the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, ransomware creeps have knocked offline a public health agency's website that served nearly a quarter of a million people in the US. The Champaign Urbana Public Health District in Illinois, covering 210,000 folks, including the state's biggest university, said today it has had to set up an alternate website as it deals with a ransomware infection that took down its primary site. A spokesperson for the district also confirmed an earlier report from Mother Jones that the outage, which began Tuesday morning, was caused by a ransomware infection rather than a crush of traffic.

Of course, the WHO website wouldn't ask for your email password - it's a public information website, after all, not a webmail service, so it has no need for your email details. The crooks were hoping that because their website looked exactly like the real thing - in fact, it contained the real website, running in a background browser frame with the illicit popup on top - you might just put in your email details out of habit.

Victims of dodgy IT support from Office Depot will start receiving compensation checks, a US consumer watchdog said Thursday. The payouts come from a 2019 settlement the retail giant reached with the FTC, after the biz was accused of letting employees and a computer support provider trick punters into paying for unneeded malware cleanup and security software.

Mitsubishi Electric says hackers exploited a zero-day vulnerability in its anti-virus software, prior to the vendor patching the flaw, and potentially stole trade secrets and employee data. Mitsubishi Electric says data it believes was exposed during the attack includes records belonging to 1,987 job applicants, employee data for 4,566 new graduate recruitment applicants, information on 1,569 retired employees, as well as corporate-confidential technical and sales materials.

Foreign currency mega-exchange Travelex said on Thursday it was forced offline by a "Software virus" infection, bring down a number of currency-exchange websites with it. The outage at Travelex has had a knock-in effect in that it knackered currency-swap services for a number of UK banks and organizations relying on the exchange.

Here's a short list of 7 malware categories we hope you never encounter. Sadly, it's not an exhaustive list... but it's a helpful start.

An attacker whose motives are unclear compromised an Asterisk server in a highly targeted campaign.

There are dozens of known groups, hundreds of C2 servers and millions of victim websites.

Bad OpSec led to the botnet's discovery -- revealing 800,000 victims in Russia.