Cyber Bites

A hacker has leaked today the usernames and passwords of nearly 23 million players of Webkinz World, an online children's game managed by Canadian toy company Ganz. The Webkinz game launched in 2005 as the online counterpart of a line of Ganz plush toys. Users could enter a code from their plush toy on the Webkinz website where they could play and manage a version of their toy in the form of a virtual pet....

“A security incident involving our internal systems, and causing service disruptions for some of our clients, is the result of a Maze ransomware attack” Another IT services heavyweight has fallen victim to a ransomware attack, with the US’s Cognizant — a $16.8 billion by 2019 revenue stalwart of the Fortune 500 — admitting over the weekend that a “Maze ransomware attack” had hit internal systems and was causing service disruption for clients. Source: CBR

The federal government is hoping to make tech giants such as Facebook and Google pay for Australian content if it is a source of profit. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has been directed to develop a mandatory code of conduct to address bargaining power imbalances between digital platforms and media companies. The move forms part of the government's response to the ACCC's Digital Platforms Inquiry, which in July made a total of 23...

 The stolen records of 20 million users of a popular Android app store have been published online by a hacker who claims to have 19 million more. Not all app stores are the same. Android users have access to the official Google Play Store, complete with nearly three million (2,870,985) apps available for download. Then there are the manufacturer app stores, of which the best known are probably the Samsung Galaxy Store and the Huawei...

With general elections expected to be held within a year, Singapore's political parties have been issued advisories about the threat of foreign interference and cybersecurity threats. They are urged to seek out precautionary measures to safeguard their ICT infrastructure, data, as well as online accounts. The city-state's Ministry of Home Affairs, Cyber Security Agency, and Elections Department on Monday said there had been many reports of foreign interference over the past few years in elections...

 Game-maker Zynga Inc.'s data security measures allegedly were weak and enabled a breach affecting more than 170 million users of its Words With Friends online game, according to a complaint filed in California federal court. The suit filed Wednesday in the Northern District of California claims Zynga failed to “reasonably protect” the data and didn’t provide timely breach notification, in violation of state consumer protection laws. Source: Bloomberg Law

  A massive television ad fraud campaign that abuses the programmatic advertising ecosystem for connected TV (CTV) has successfully impersonated more than 2 million people in over 30 countries so far during its run, defrauding more than 300 different brands out of their ad dollars. The recently uncovered CTV operation — named ICEBUCKET by the researchers at White Ops that discovered it – was bent on tricking advertisers into thinking there were real people watching...

SentinelOne has spoken out after an "attention-seeking prankster" trolled one of the firm's security researchers with the release of a new ransomware strain. On Wednesday, the cybersecurity firm said that new MBRLocker malware variants have been released in a consistent wave over April, and while many of them appear to be little more than "pranks" rather than serious attempts at deploying ransomware capable of generating a profit, one particular release caught the company's attention. Source:...

Hackers claim they have discovered two zero-day vulnerabilities for the Zoom video conferencing platform that would allow threat actors to spy on people’s private video conferences and further exploit a target’s system. Flaws target Zoom clients for the Windows and the MacOS operating system, according to a published report by Vice Motherboard. According to the report, the hackers are asking $500,000 for the Windows exploit. The article cites two unnamed cybersecurity zero-day brokers who claim...

Confidential documents belonging to some of the largest aerospace companies in the world were stolen and updated on the internet by the hackers after Visser denied to pay the ransom. The company manufactures precision parts for major industry players and these include CNC Machining, Injection Molds & Tooling, Metal Additive Manufacturing & 3D Plastic Printing. According to the Register, these documents included details of military equipment designed by Lockheed-Martin such as specifications for an antenna...