A week of cybercrimes: Here’s what you need to know
The digital world’s exposure to cyberthreats disturbance as potential and targeted attacks shows how cybercrimes has escalated to be one of the most reported crimes, with data breaches and fraud losses to exceed $200 billion over the next 5 years.
Following the chain of notorious cyberattacks breaching the security of a plethora of businesses worldwide carried out by cyber-criminal gangs, hackers are slowly bringing businesses and tech companies to their knees with ulterior intentions.
With the ongoing and distressing rise of cyberattacks on various business and consumers’ privacy, a recently conducted research by Juniper Research uncovered that businesses will cumulatively lose over $200 billion to online fraud between 2020 and 2024.
This could be prevented by incorporating machine learning into their fraud detection, reaching $10 billion in 2024, a 15 percent rise in 2020. This will lead to the growth of payment fraud with losses increasing by 130 percent from 2020 to 2024.
New Trump Social media app hacked on launch day
According to Jason Miller, a senior advisor to the Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, a social media site named GETTR, which was launched on Sunday, was briefly hacked, after more than 500,000 people had already registered to use the site.
In an emailed statement sent to Reuters, Miller referred to the incident as a “brief problem that was detected and sealed in a matter of minutes, and all the intruder was able to accomplish was to change a few usernames.”
The site was released after Miller taunted Trump’s social media team to initiate a new app, after the social media blockage Trump faced following the Capital riot that took place on January 6. The situation was immediately rectified by the campaign’s team preventing any further damage to the site.
REvil demand ransom $70 million to restore data
The notion of hackers demanding ransom payment to restore data held by companies has been resurfacing for a while, expanding on a wider scale by the day. As this introduces a scene of mass extortion attacks affiliated with major companies worldwide, a new demand of $70 million emerged on Sunday to restore data, according to Reuters.
At this juncture, the notorious cybercrime gang who call themselves “REvil” seems to be at the center of another breach, as it executed on Friday one of its most dramatic hacks operation so far. After a security firm based in New Mexico was victimized by the infamousransomware, a massive number of businesses were infected by the ransomware on Friday.
Impacting more than 1,000 businesses, the attack’s execution took place by locating a vulnerability in the update mechanism adopted by the IT services firm Kaseya affecting different companies adopting its software — a software platform created to assist in remote IT managed service providers (MSP).
Attackers took advantage of the weakness created by their ransomware to dispense a malicious payload to weak virtual servers. Then, the dispensed malware ran multiple commands to prevent detection by Microsoft Defender, by instructing the Kesaya update process to run a legitimate but expired version of “Antimalware Service” – a component of Windows Defender.
“While our early indicators suggested that only a very small number of on premises customers were affected, we took a conservative approach in shutting down the servers to ensure we protected our more than 36,000 customers to the best ability,” Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola said in an issues statement.
SolarWinds proceed with a new Microsoft Breach
After Nobelium’s cyberattack into Texas-based SolarWinds’s systems and the implementation of malicious code in the company’s software system, the Russian-made hack managed to jeopardize Microsoft’s employee’s computer system by targeting attacks against business consumers via billing contact details.
The hacking group implemented password-spraying alongside brute -force methods to threaten three undisclosed entities, leading to acquiring unapproved access to accounts by attacking login servers with major login guesses.
“As part of our examination into this continuous activity, we likewise discovered information-stealing malware on a maker comping from among our consumer assistance representatives with access to fundamental account details for a little number of our consumers,” Microsoft declared in a blog post.
As Microsoft’s announcement came as a shock to security experts, the attack targeted specific consumers, with 57 percent in the IT business, 20 percent in federal governments companies, and the remaining in nongovernmental companies.
All in all, consumers from 36 nations were targeted and affected by the cyberattack.
Apex Legends hackers interrupt games with messages about Titanfall hacking
Despite many efforts made by Respawn’s developers to prevent further cybercrimes into their system, most of these attempts were faced with utter disappointment from the famed game’s userbase.
As Titanfall players hacked Apex Legends to protest breaches, the popular game was hit with a “save Titanfall” message directing Apex players to SaveTitanfall.com demonstrating the real purpose behind the hack. This raised awareness against hackers and DDoS attacks on their servers, website, and network floods that make it unplayable.
This previous hack, imposed on all Apex players, prevented a large portion of players from accessing any of the game’s modes, but affected primarily those who play the game on PC. In principle, hackers pioneered a fresh algorithm that aims to jeopardize the bullets aim, decreasing the game’s effectiveness. This will occur by removing any level of artificial accuracy making it unrecognizable by Respawn’s anti-cheat system.
“We are aware of and actively investigating issues impacting @PlayApex playlist that are preventing players from getting into matches”, said the famous gaming company while addressed the situation on Twitter. Nevertheless, while the team is working on demolishing the problem, the developer declared that these attacks do not endanger players’ personal information in any way.