Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity firm: Booting hackers a complex chore

Efforts to assess the impact of a more than seven-month-old cyberespionage campaign blamed on Russia — and boot the intruders — remain in their early stages, says the cybersecurity firm that discovered the attack. The hack has badly shaken the U.S. government and private sector. The firm, FireEye, released a tool and a white paper […]

EU regulator: Hackers 'manipulated' stolen vaccine documents

The European Union’s drug regulator said Friday that COVID-19 vaccine documents stolen from its servers by hackers have been not only leaked to the web, but “manipulated.” The European Medicines Agency said that an ongoing investigation showed that hackers obtained emails and documents from November related to the evaluation of experimental coronavirus vaccines. The agency, […]

New Zealand central bank says data system hacked

New Zealand’s central bank said Sunday that one of its data systems has been breached by an unidentified hacker who potentially accessed commercially and personally sensitive information. A third party file sharing service used by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand to share and store sensitive information had been illegally accessed, the Wellington-based bank said […]

US: Hack of federal agencies 'likely Russian in origin'

Top national security agencies confirmed Tuesday that Russia was likely responsible for a massive hack of U.S. government departments and corporations, rejecting President Donald Trump’s claim that China might be to blame. The rare joint statement represented the U.S. government’s first formal attempt to assign responsibility for the breaches at multiple agencies and to assign […]

German government backs bill requiring 5G security pledge

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Cabinet approved a bill Wednesday that would require companies involved in setting up critical infrastructure such as high-speed 5G networks to guarantee that their equipment can’t be used for sabotage, espionage or terrorism. The bill, which now goes to parliament, seeks to address concerns that vendors such as Chinese tech company […]

Cybersecurity trends in 2021: Learning from a harsh year

This year has been unlike any other in living memory, barely any aspects of our lives have been spared by the impact of the worst public health crisis in decades. The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic shifted the way we lead our day-to-day, laying bare to our collective fragility, while greatly heightening our sense of uncertainty. The […]

US agencies hacked in monthslong global cyberspying campaign

U.S. government agencies were ordered to scour their networks for malware and disconnect potentially compromised servers after authorities learned that the Treasury and Commerce departments were hacked in a monthslong global cyberespionage campaign discovered when a prominent cybersecurity firm learned it had been breached. In a rare emergency directive issued late Sunday, the Department of […]

Addressing the fear of AI in cybersecurity roles

Fear of automation has been present since the first industrial revolution, and as we slowly edge closer toward entering its fourth iteration, that very same fear has lingered and begun to creep up once more. Only now it has cozied up to another worthy ally that could unearth age old fears of job loss: artificial […]

How con artists scam the elderly in the digital age

Scammers, hackers, and fraudsters have attempted to exploit our lack of knowledge both on and offline. Unfortunately, senior citizens have been on the short end of the stick for a while, making them the most targeted groups among all others. A report published by Deloitte estimates that scammers steal almost $2.9 billion per year from […]

Employee blamed for Absa data breach

Absa, a Johannesburg-based financial services company, has revealed that one of its employees has leaked data pertaining to some of its South African customers – which include client ID numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers and mobile phone numbers – to several third parties in return for payment. “The employee has unlawfully made selected […]