Cybersecurity

China’s MIIT halts cybersecurity deal with Alibaba Cloud

According to state-backed media reports, Alibaba Cloud Computing’s information-sharing partnership was put to an end on Wednesday by Chinese watchdogs, following allegations of neglecting to report and tackle a cyber threat. The 21st Century Business Herald reported that the subsidiary of the e-commerce giant failed to promptly report weaknesses in the famous, open course logging […]

Spyware find highlights depth of hacker-for-hire industry

Security researchers said Thursday they found two kinds of commercial spyware on the phone of a leading exiled Egyptian dissident, providing new evidence of the depth and diversity of the abusive hacker-for-hire industry. One piece of malware recently found on an iPhone belonging to Ayman Nour, a dissident and 2005 Egyptian presidential candidate who subsequently […]

'The internet's on fire' as techs race to fix software flaw

A critical vulnerability in a widely used software tool — one quickly exploited in the online game Minecraft — is rapidly emerging as a major threat to organizations around the world. “The internet’s on fire right now,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. “People are scrambling to patch,” […]

Group: Pandemic tech tools raise risk of everyday tracking

Tech tools like digital contact tracing apps and artificial intelligence that European governments rolled out to combat COVID-19 failed to play a key role in solving the pandemic and now threaten to make such monitoring widely accepted, a new report shows. The health surveillance technologies that many European countries deployed after the coronavirus pandemic erupted […]

Report: Chinese hackers targeted Southeast Asian nations

Chinese hackers, likely state-sponsored, have been broadly targeting government and private-sector organizations across Southeast Asia, including those closely involved with Beijing on infrastructure development projects, according to a report released Wednesday by a U.S.-based private cybersecurity company. Specific targets included the Thai prime minister’s office and the Thai army, the Indonesian and Philippine navies, Vietnam’s […]

Report says Russian hackers haven't eased spying efforts

The elite Russian state hackers behind last year’s massive SolarWinds cyberespionage campaign hardly eased up this year, managing plenty of infiltrations of U.S. and allied government agencies and foreign policy think tanks with consummate craft and stealth, a leading cybersecurity firm reported. Also Monday, Microsoft announced that it had disrupted the cyber-spying of a state-backed […]

Data hacked for 400,000 Planned Parenthood LA patients

The Los Angeles branch of Planned Parenthood was hit by a data breach involving about 400,000 patients, but there is no indication that the information was used “for fraudulent purposes,” the group said. A hacker installed computer malware between Oct. 9 and Oct. 17 and “exfiltrated” files containing patient names and possibly addresses, insurance and […]

Panasonic confirms cyber breach to its access data

Japanese manufacturing titan, Panasonic, confirmed Friday its network has been infiltrated by a cyberattack directed at its access data, on November 11, by gaining entry via third party. In its statement, the company revealed that “some data on a file server had been accessed during the intrusion.” This marks the only information publicized by the […]

Apple suing Israeli hacker-for-hire company NSO Group

Tech giant Apple announced Tuesday it is suing Israel’s NSO Group, seeking to block the world’s most infamous hacker-for-hire company from breaking into Apple’s products, like the iPhone. Apple said in a complaint filed in federal court in California that NSO Group employees are “amoral 21st century mercenaries who have created highly sophisticated cyber-surveillance machinery […]