Cyber Bites

A ransomware campaign, dubbed Hakbit, is targeting mid-level employees across Austria, Switzerland and Germany with malicious Excel attachments delivered via the popular email provider GMX. The spear-phishing based campaign is low volume and so far targeted the pharmaceutical, legal, financial, business service, retail, and healthcare sectors. Low-volume style campaigns, sometimes called snowshoe spam attacks, use multiple domains to send relatively small blasts of bogus emails to circumvent reputation- or volume-based spam filtering. “The largest volume...

A Twitter spokesperson has told ZDNet today that they've permanently suspended the @DDoSecrets Twitter account for violating its policy about the distribution of hacked data after the account shared links to hacked data stolen from US law enforcement agencies. Prior to the ban, enforced earlier today, the DDoSecrets account belonged to an activist group going by the formal name of Distributed Denial of Secrets. On Friday, last week, the group published 296 GB of data...

According to reports, more than 10,000 people have joined a group class action against easyJet after personal details of nine million customers were breached in the recent cyber attack. LAW firm PGMBM is leading the case against the budget carrier after filing papers last month with the sheer amount of customers from more than 50 countries making it one of the UK’s biggest group-action personal data claims. easyJet revealed in May that it was the...

A new report reveals that 41% of Irish firms experienced at least one cyber attack event in a six month period from September 2019 to February 2020. This is among the findings of a study of 5,569 companies across eight countries that was commissioned by insurer Hiscox, which includes Irish data for the first time. Today's report also shows that 6.5% of Irish firms paid a ransom following a ransomware attack. The Hiscox Insurance study...

An alleged breach of COVID-19 test result data is being investigated by authorities in Indonesia. Concerns over a possible breach were raised after a hacker tried to sell what they claimed was the personal information of hundreds of thousands of people who had been tested for the novel coronavirus in Indonesia on an online forum. Posting on the database sharing and marketplace forum RaidForums on June 18, the alleged hacker claimed to have exfiltrated the test results...

AMD has fixed one high-severity vulnerability affecting its client and embedded processors; fixes for the other two will come out later in June. Three high-severity vulnerabilities have been disclosed in AMD’s client and embedded processors that came out between 2016 and 2019. An attacker with physical or privileged access to certain AMD powered systems could exploit the flaws to execute arbitrary code or take control of the firmware. AMD, which dubs the flaws “SMM Callout...

Indian conglomerate Indiabulls Group has allegedly been hit with a cyberattack from the CLOP Ransomware operators who have leaked screenshots of stolen data. The Indiabulls Group is an Indian conglomerate with $3.5 billion in revenue (2019), over 19,000 employees, and subsidiaries focusing on housing, personal finance and lending, infrastructure, and pharmaceuticals. "The Indiabulls Group is a diversified financial services group with interests in housing finance, consumer finance and personal wealth. The Group also has a presence...

IBM Security released findings from a study focused on the behaviours and security risks of those new to working from home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study shows more than 80% of respondents either rarely worked from home or not at all prior to the pandemic, and, in turn, more than half are now doing so with no new security policies to help guide them. This shift to working from home has exposed new security risks and...

Hundreds of thousands of potentially sensitive files from police departments across the United States were leaked online last week. The collection, dubbed “BlueLeaks” and made searchable online, stems from a security breach at a Texas web design and hosting company that maintains a number of state law enforcement data-sharing portals. The collection — nearly 270 gigabytes in total — is the latest release from Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), an alternative to Wikileaks that publishes caches of previously secret...

As lockdown and isolation measures were enacted across the world in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, engagement in at-home entertainment activities predictably skyrocketed – gaming, in particular, saw massive increases in user engagement. Kaspersky noticed this trend, and upon investigation, unsurprisingly found many instances of cyber attackers exploiting this increased engagement in video games: in April there was a 54% increase in the daily number of attempts to direct users to malicious sites from...