How many different shades of bizarre is the data breach notification issued by software vendor Blackbaud? Over the course of three paragraphs, Blackbaud normalizes hacking, congratulates its amazing cybersecurity team, and says it cares so much for its customers that it paid a ransom to attackers.
If the first rule of combating attempted election interference by nation-states is to watch for when it's happening, where does that leave Britain? A scathing report from Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee concludes that national security was likely trumped by Russian money.
Following Twitter's admission that cryptocurrency scammers socially engineered its employees to gain control of 45 high-profile accounts, one reaction has been: Why didn't anyone crack Twitter sooner? Unfortunately, the answer is that they have, especially if you count nation-states bribing insiders.
Britain's U-turn on Huawei, announcing that it will now ban the manufacturer's gear from its 5G networks, highlights this as yet unresolved problem: Years of underinvestment and policy failures have left Britain and its allies with no inexpensive, trusted alternative.
To the long list of alleged hackers who failed to practice good operational security so they could remain anonymous, add another name: Andrey Turchin, who's been charged with running the Fxmsp hacking group, which prosecutors say relied on Jabber and bitcoins in an attempt to hide their real identities.
U.S. prosecutors this week unsealed an indictment against the alleged hacker "Fxmsp" after his identity was revealed in a cybersecurity firm's report. That sequence of events has raised questions about information sharing and highlighted law enforcement's reliance on private cybersecurity researchers.
Ransomware-wielding attackers continue to pummel organizations. But labeling these as being just ransomware attacks often misses how much these incidents involve serious network intrusions, exfiltration of extensive amounts of data, data leaks and, as a result, reportable data breaches.
Could your organization withstand an attack by the master hacking operation known as "Fxmsp"? Hollywood loves to portray hackers as having ninja-like skills. But Fxmsp often favored the simplest tools for the job, because they so often worked. Defenders: Take note.
Many ransomware gangs hell-bent on seeing a criminal payday have now added data exfiltration to their shakedown arsenal. Gangs' extortion play: Pay us, or we'll dump stolen data. One massive takeaway is that increasingly, ransomware outbreaks also are data breaches, thus triggering breach notification rules.
Britain's failure to contain COVID-19 - despite Prime Minister Boris Johnson promising a "world-beating" effort - now includes a failed digital contact-tracing app. A new version, built to work with Apple and Google APIs, may be released by winter. Really, what's the rush?
The Maze ransomware gang is continuing to exfiltrate data from victims before crypto-locking their systems, then leaking the data to try to force non-payers to accede to its ransom demands. Don't want to play ransomware gangs' latest games? The only way to opt out is by planning ahead.
How big is the step from humans using drones to kill other humans to building lethal autonomous weapons systems that can kill on their own? Ethically and technologically, that's a huge leap. But military planners are working to build what some call "killer robots." And the UN wants them banned.
Not all data breaches are what they might seem, and not all leakers are who they might claim to be. Take the doxing of the Minneapolis Police Department, supposedly by Anonymous hacktivists: The leaked employee information was almost certainly culled from old breaches. So who did it, and why?
Australian shipping giant Toll Group recently suffered its second ransomware outbreak of the year, with Thomas Knudsen, the company's managing director, branding the latest attack as being "serious and regrettable." But was it preventable?
Security experts and law enforcement officials have long argued that paying ransoms doesn't pay. For starters, it directly funds the cybercrime ecosystem and makes it attractive for criminals to keep launching ransomware attacks.
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