A global epidemic of digital extortion known as ransomware is crippling local governments, hospitals, school districts and businesses by scrambling their data files until they pay up. Law enforcement has been largely powerless to stop it. One big reason: Ransomware rackets are dominated by Russian-speaking cybercriminals who are shielded — and sometimes employed — by […]
Cybersecurity
The Treasury Department on Thursday slapped six Russian technology companies with sanctions for supporting Kremlin intelligence agencies engaged in “dangerous and disruptive cyber attacks.” But only one of them stands out for its international footprint and partnerships with such IT heavyweights as Microsoft and IBM. That company, Positive Technologies, claims more than 2,000 customers in […]
The beginning of April was considered the worst week for social media firms across the aisle, as news headlines as far as the finger can scroll were swamped with news of billions of user accounts were leaked on a hacker forum for sale. Leaks affected social networking giants such as Facebook, popular audio drop-in app […]
President Joe Biden has selected two former senior National Security Agency officials for key cyber jobs in his administration, the White House said Monday in moving to fill out a team whose role has grown more urgent after two major hacks that have consumed the government’s attention. Chris Inglis, a former NSA deputy director, is […]
Paul Davison, CEO of the popular drop-in audio app Clubhouse, pushed back on Sunday against reports that personal user data from the platform had been leaked online. Late last week, CyberNews reported that an SQL database containing 1.3 million scraped Clubhouse user records leaked for free on a popular hacker forum. The database consisted of […]
A few days following the massive Facebook data leak, LinkedIn becomes the second social networking platform hit with a data leak encompassing millions of accounts, CyberNews reported on Thursday. The leak’s huge scope was discovered by CyberNews when an individual selling the data on a hacker forum claims it was scraped from 500 million LinkedIn […]
Details from more than 500 million Facebook users have been found available on a website for hackers. The information appears to be several years old, but it is another example of the vast amount of information collected by Facebook and other social media sites, and the limits to how secure that information is. The availability […]
Australian telcos have blocked 55 million scam calls to Australian phone numbers since new rules requiring providers to detect, trace and block scam calls were introduced in December 2020 by the Australian Communications and Media Regulator (ACMA). According to the regulatory body, the total number of blocked scam calls include nearly 11 million ‘Wangiri’ scam […]
Suspected Russian hackers gained access to email accounts belonging to the Trump administration’s head of the Department of Homeland Security and members of the department’s cybersecurity staff whose jobs included hunting threats from foreign countries, The Associated Press has learned. The intelligence value of the hacking of then-acting Secretary Chad Wolf and his staff is […]
The U.S. Cyber Command conducted more than two dozen operations aimed at thwarting interference in last November’s presidential election, the general who leads the Pentagon’s cyber force said Thursday. Gen. Paul Nakasone did not describe the nature of the operations in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee but said they were designed “to get […]