Cyber Bites

So far in 2022 more than 40 million UK consumers are thought to have been targeted by digital fraudsters. This is a double-digit increase from the same time last year. In May, Citizens Advice commissioned a poll of over 2000 adults in the UK asking if they had been contacted by scammers since the start of 2022. 14% more people than last year said that they had been targeted in an attack. The most common...

On April 5th, Kaiser Permanente discovered and, within an hour, terminated an unauthorized parties' breach into an employee's emails from the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Washington. Access to these emails exposed the names, dates of service, medical record numbers, and laboratory test result information. Kaiser has so far not found any indication that the breach exposed the protected health information (PHI) of their clients yet could not rule out the possibility. In addition to...

The results of the third edition of the annual Voice of SecOPs Report found that 45% of respondents in C-suite and senior cybersecurity roles were considering exiting the industry due to stress and incessant threats from ransomware. 46% of those surveyed knew someone in the past year who left due to stressors. Threats from ransomware was the primary reason for this ‘Great Resignation’. The survey found that 38% of respondents paid the ransom; 46% said...

UK law enforcement have shut down one of the country's largest-ever drugs laboratories, thanks to the takedown of a popular encrypted comms service in 2020. Before police cracked it two years ago, EncroChat was used by tens of thousands of criminals globally. Hundreds of arrests and several convictions have been made as a result. The latest convictions were handed to Andrew Gurney, 51, of Quinton, Birmingham, and Keith Davis, 62, of Chalfont St Giles. Gurney...

An engineer at Google has claimed that the AI system he was working on has became sentient. There is renewed urgency to design ethical codes and regulations for the industry. Blake Lemoine wrote in a blog post over the weekend describing how LaMDA, the chatbot-generating system, that he was working on told him that it wants to be acknowledged as a Google employee, as opposed to property. He claimed, reportedly, that LaMDA has the ability...

Reportedly, the Russian government has warned the U.S. and its allies that continued cyber-attacks on its infrastructure risks a "direct military clash." The threats follow reports from last week that Russia's Ministry of Construction, Housing and Utilities website had been hacked and replaced with a message stating "Glory to Ukraine" on its homepage. A foreign ministry statement blamed actors in the U.S. and Ukraine for increasing attacks on state institutions and critical infrastructure, according to...

Security researchers warn users that they block millions of extortion scam emails each day. On average one million extortion emails are blocked every 24 hours, according to Proofpoint. On high volume days two million emails are blocked. They usually come in the form of sextortion, whereby the attacker claims to have a webcam video of the victim watching porn and threatens to send it to all the user's email contacts unless a ransom is paid,...

It has been reported by cybersecurity researchers that there has been an increase in the activity of the Hello XD ransomware. Its operators are now deploying an upgraded sample featuring stronger encryption. This family of ransomware is based on the leaked source code of Babuk and engaged in a small number of double-extortion attacks where threat actors stole corporate data before encrypting devices. The threat was first observed in November 2021. The malware's author has...

A new advanced persistent threat (APT) actor, reportedly based in China and dubbed Aoqin Dragon, has been linked to several hacking attacks across Australia and Southeast Asia against education, government and telecom entities since 2013. Sentinel Labs, threat researchers, published a blog post on Thursday outlining the events. Joey Chen, threat intelligence researcher at SentinelOne, said: “we assess that the threat actor’s primary focus is espionage and relates to targets in Australia, Cambodia, Hong Kong,...

A new form of Linux malware that is "almost impossible" to detect has been found in a joint research effort by BlackBerry Threat Research & Research team and Intezer security researcher Joakim Kennedy. It has been dubbed Symbiote. A blog post on the malware was released on Thursday. It has been called Symbiote because of its "parasitic nature." Symbiote is different to typical Linux malware because it acts as a shared object (SO) library that...