Information

New Leak Shows Business Side of China’s APT Menace

A new data leak that appears to have come from one of China’s top private cybersecurity firms provides a rare glimpse into the commercial side of China’s many state-sponsored hacking groups. Experts say the leak illustrates how Chinese government agencies increasingly are contracting out foreign espionage campaigns to the nation’s burgeoning and highly competitive cybersecurity industry. A marketing slide deck promoting i-SOON’s Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) capabilities. A large cache of more than 500 documents…

Read More

Feds Seize LockBit Ransomware Websites, Offer Decryption Tools, Troll Affiliates

U.S. and U.K. authorities have seized the darknet websites run by LockBit, a prolific and destructive ransomware group that has claimed more than 2,000 victims worldwide and extorted over $120 million in payments. Instead of listing data stolen from ransomware victims who didn’t pay, LockBit’s victim shaming website now offers free recovery tools, as well as news about arrests and criminal charges involving LockBit affiliates. Investigators used the existing design on LockBit’s victim shaming website…

Read More

Cyber-insurance and vulnerability scanning – Week in security with Tony Anscombe

Video Here’s how the results of vulnerability scans factor into decisions on cyber-insurance and how human intelligence comes into play in the assessment of such digital signals 16 Feb 2024 Cyber-insurance has been an increasingly hot topic lately, with the cyber-insurance industry growing of 62 percent last year, which largely appears to be attributable to new contracts. To qualify for a cyber insurance policy, organizations need to meet certain security requirements, which includes having certain…

Read More

The art of digital sleuthing: How digital forensics unlocks the truth

The burgeoning field of digital forensics plays a crucial role in investigating a wide range of cybercrimes and cybersecurity incidents. Indeed, in our technology-centric world, even investigations of ‘traditional’ crimes often include an element of digital evidence that is waiting to be retrieved and analyzed. This art of uncovering, analyzing and interpreting digital evidence has seen substantial growth particularly in investigations involving various kinds of fraud and cybercrime, tax evasion, stalking, child exploitation, intellectual property…

Read More

All eyes on AI | Unlocked 403: A cybersecurity podcast

Video Artificial intelligence is on everybody’s lips these days, but there are also many misconceptions about what AI actually is and isn’t. We unpack the basics and examine AI’s broader implications. Alžbeta Kovaľová 15 Feb 2024 Artificial intelligence (AI) is clearly the topic du jour as technologies that fall under the umbrella term of AI become increasingly woven into the fabric of our everyday lives. But what do we actually talk about when we talk…

Read More

Deepfakes in the global election year of 2024: A weapon of mass deception?

Digital Security As fabricated images, videos and audio clips of real people go mainstream, the prospect of a firehose of AI-powered disinformation is a cause for mounting concern Phil Muncaster 13 Feb 2024  •  , 5 min. read Fake news has dominated election headlines ever since it became a big story during the race for the White House back in 2016. But eight years later, there’s an arguably bigger threat: a combination of disinformation and…

Read More

U.S. Internet Leaked Years of Internal, Customer Emails

The Minnesota-based Internet provider U.S. Internet Corp. has a business unit called Securence, which specializes in providing filtered, secure email services to businesses, educational institutions and government agencies worldwide. But until it was notified last week, U.S. Internet was publishing more than a decade’s worth of its internal email — and that of thousands of Securence clients — in plain text out on the Internet and just a click away for anyone with a Web…

Read More

Fat Patch Tuesday, February 2024 Edition

Microsoft Corp. today pushed software updates to plug more than 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related products, including two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited in active attacks. Top of the heap on this Fat Patch Tuesday is CVE-2024-21412, a “security feature bypass” in the way Windows handles Internet Shortcut Files that Microsoft says is being targeted in active exploits. Redmond’s advisory for this bug says an attacker would need…

Read More

Ransomware payments hit a record high in 2023 – Week in security with Tony Anscombe

Video, Ransomware Called a “watershed year for ransomware”, 2023 marked a reversal from the decline in ransomware payments observed in the previous year 09 Feb 2024 Ransomware payments in 2023 reached a record-breaking $1.1 billion in 2023, according to an analysis by Chainalysis, a blockchain research firm. Calling 2023 a “watershed year for ransomware”, Chainalysis also said that last year marked a reversal from the decline observed in 2022, when the payments were “only” half…

Read More

The buck stops here: Why the stakes are high for CISOs

Business Security Heavy workloads and the specter of personal liability for incidents take a toll on security leaders, so much so that many of them look for the exits. What does this mean for corporate cyber-defenses? Phil Muncaster 08 Feb 2024  •  , 5 min. read Cybersecurity is finally becoming a board-level issue. That’s as it should be, given the increasingly important role cyber-risk management plays in strategic decision making. Cyber-risk is fundamentally a core…

Read More