Cyber Bites

Facebook has removed several accounts linked to the Philippines military and police for breaching the social media platform's government interference guidelines. A full investigation of these accounts was brought to Facebook's attention after information was brought to them by Rappler, an independent news sources in the Philipines. The operation has been linked back to those both in the Philippines and China, who aimed to mislead people about who they were and what they wanted. In...

A report by Webroot has found that more than one in five UK employees (22%) have received a COVID-19 related phishing email. The Webroot survey gathered data from 7,000 office workers worldwide and found that employees are receiving 34% more emails than they were last year. The survey also showed that business needs to remain alert in regards to security risks as governments ask employees to work from home in the wake of Covid-19. The...

Netwrix has released its 2020 Cyber Threats Report aiming to understand the different threats industry professionals experience and how they respond to them, particularly in the time of COVID-19 with more employees working from home. The report outlines how 1 in 4 organisations feel they were exposed to more threats during the pandemic than they were before. What's more, 63% reported an increase in cyber attacks and 60% saw an increase in security gaps as...

A newly identified cybercrime group has been repeatedly targeting Russian businesses with malware and ransomware as security firm Group-IB has found. Oleg Skulkin, Group-IB's senior DFIR analyst states that "this is very unusual for Russian-speaking gangs who have this unspoken rule about not working within Russia and post-Soviet countries." The group go by the name OldGremlin who begin their attacks by with sending out a phishing email with a malware file attached. Once this rips...

Stony Brook University Hospital recently issued a warning to patients about a ransomware attacks which potentially exposed their personal data. Stony Brook University Hospital is the only tertiary care center and Regional Trauma Center in Long Island, and is just one of many recent hospitals to experience a data breach. The hospital contacted patients to inform them of the potential exposure of their details following the attack on the hospital's third-party vendor Blackbaud. Blackbaud is...

The Online e-commerce platform Shopify experienced a security breach caused by two rogue employees who accessed customer transaction details from merchants on the site. Shopify has estimated that under 200 of their one million online stores were affected by the breach. The breach is currently being investigated by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies alongside Shopify. Shopify has said that the breach was not due to vulnerability in their platform, but simply because of...

In a congressional hearing last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray stated that China has been involved in a massive data mining scheme that has likely stolen the personal information of nearly half the country's population. Wray also gave new details on the scale of Chinese hacking efforts, outlining an attack back in 2017 when credit bureau Equifax was hacked revealing the financial information of 150 million people. Mr Wray told the House Homeland Security Committee...

Luxottica, who owns popular eyewear brands Ray Ban, Oakley, Micheal Kors, Prada, Chanel and many more has faced severe technical issues resulting in the shutting down of their offices in Agordo and Sedico, Italy as well as their online portal system. Customers reported that the websites for some of Luxottica's major retailers were not working, raising the question of a breach to their systems. Bleeping Computer has reported that a vulnerability in their Critrix ADX...

Since Covid-19 and an increase of people working from home across the world, there has been an increase in cyberattacks in India. These cyberattacks typically focus on compromising digital systems of both public and private businesses. The Indian government has found that the country has experienced over 3.5 lakh cybersecurity incidents in July and August, which is triple the number of incidents experienced in Indian in the first three months of 2020. India is especially...

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released Emergency Directive (ED) 20-04 addressing a critical vulnerability— CVE-2020-1472—affecting Microsoft Windows Netlogon Remote Protocol. An unauthenticated attacker with network access to a domain controller could exploit this vulnerability to compromise all Active Directory identity services. Earlier this month, exploit code for this vulnerability was publicly released. Given the nature of the exploit and documented adversary behaviour, CISA assumes active exploitation of this vulnerability is occurring in the wild. ED...