Cyber Bites

Bugs in Firefox, Edge and Chrome browsers have been discovered to allow remote system hijacking. The vulnerability found within Mozilla Firefox (known as CVE-2020-16044) has been reported separately from a different bug which has been reported in Google's browser engine, Chromium. Chromium is used in Google Chrome as well as the latest version of Edge. Creators of the browsers are asking users to patch these newfound vulnerabilities as if they are left unpatched users run...

A hacker is currently selling Aurora Cannabis files, which were stored during a breach on Christmas day. Aurora Cannabis is a large Canadian cannabis production company, who operate a number of medical and consumer cannabis brands, such as CanniMed, San Rafael, Woodstock, MedRelease and Whistler Medical Marijuana Corp. The hacker who is selling the stolen data on a hacker forum is selling it for one bitcoin and has released images of eleven stolen files from...

Following a cyberattack in October, it appears that personal details of Hackney Council residents and staff members have been published on the dark web. The data posted online was "limited and "not visible through search engines" according to experts. Officials are continuing to work with the UK National Cyber Security Centre and National Crime Agency in order to investigate the hack. Guy Nicholson, Hackney Council's cabinet member, said that the hack affected a number of...

The software development firm JetBrains has published a statement denying allegations from publications such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times which claimed that JetBrains were under investigation for their possible involvement in the SolarWinds hack. The report which cited government sources stated that US officials are investigating a situation in which Russian hackers breached JetBrains, which resulted in their customers being attacked, one of which was SolarWinds. JetBrains CEO Maxim Shafirov...

British Airways customers were affected by two data breaches in 2018. Around 185,000 reward-booking customers were informed that their personal and financial information had been compromised between April and July 2019, while 380,000 app-based customers and website users had their details exposed in August and September 2018. As compensation for the breach, British Airways has begun to discuss a settlement for affected customers with a payout of £3bn.

On Thursday the New South Wales government's COVID-19 QR check-in app, Service NSW, was down for two hours after an outage. This left NSW residents unable to check in to local businesses using the app. The app is mandatory for businesses offering hospitality services. If they do not use the Service NSW app then they can run the risk of facing an AU$5,000 fine and closure of their business for a week. If the venue...

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, and it is used to stop bots signing in or registering for accounts, as only humans can solve the tests. However, new AI is being developed to allow computers to correctly complete CAPTCHAs, as the AI is now able to complete tasks just as humans do. Recently, an AI bot has broken a Google CAPTCHA , and now researcher Nikolai Tschacher...

Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games have trained a number of cybersecurity professionals in order to defend against potential cyber-attacks. It has been reported that 220 ethical hackers were trained by a programme led by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, with most of the experts coming from Japanese telecommunication companies. As part of the training, participants attended lectures on 20 subjects, while also being split into groups to protect their systems from...

On Tuesday the police released a warning to members of the public of a new phishing scam where government officials are being impersonated. The scams have been ongoing since December 2020, with victims reporting that they have received text messages and phone calls claiming to be government agencies. These messages would alert the recipient that there was an issue with their bank account and would request them to verify their credentials, such as identity card...

On Tuesday the office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence said that it is "likely" that Russias are behind a number of hacks that took place last month where hackers gained access to federal agencies. The office, as well as the National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and FBI, shared in a joint statement that the hackers aimed to collect intelligence from the government agencies. The agencies have said that the hacker...