Cyber Bites

Google yesterday announced that its latest Chrome release adds real-time phishing alerts and password breach warning capabilities to the browser. The real-time anti-phishing capabilities represents an upgrade to Google’s Safe Browsing service, which compiles an ever-changing blacklist of dangerous websites that browsers can check against. Source: SC Magazine

Pensacola officials confirmed that an ongoing cyberattack that began early Saturday morning is a ransomware attack. While the city did not release any additional details, the Pensacola News Journal said city spokeswoman Kaycee Lagarde confirmed the attack included a ransom, something that Mayor Grover Robinson initially declined to discuss. Source: SC Magazine

Woolworths customers have had their rewards cards hacked and their points stolen just two weeks before Christmas. The Australian supermarket giant confirmed on Wednesday that Woolworths Rewards members had reported hundreds of dollars worth of points as stolen.  Disgruntled customers took to the company's social media pages to voice their concerns over the credit taken from their accounts. Source: Daily Mail

Researchers found three broad types of vulnerabilities, one of which should be particularly concerning to consumers. Amazon's popular Blink home security cameras come packed with more than most consumers bargain for, including a variety of attack vectors that could allow criminals to hijack cameras and Blink accounts. Source: Dark Reading

A Florida family has shared footage of the moment their Ring security system was accessed without permission and used to spew racial slurs last weekend. The incident occurred on Sunday in Cape Coral, with the culprit forcing a loud alarm to blare throughout the home before verbally taunting two parents, NBC-2 reported. The hacker, who sounds young, makes references to their son despite him not appearing in the frame. Source: News Week

Google is upping its efforts to safeguard users against phishing scams with a new real-time alert system. In a blog post on Tuesday, Google said it will expand on its current system that checks a reference list of flagged sites against URL's the a users has visited once every 30 minutes. According to the tech giant, while the standard has worked to mitigate many phishing scams, which involve using phony web pages and online forms to hoover users'...

The key, only one-third the length of most commercial encryption keys, took more than 35 million compute hours to break. How safe is "safe"? That's the question at the heart of research into breaking encryption keys — research that has led a team in France to the most complex encryption algorithm to date. At 240 characters long, the new record bests the old decryption record by 8 characters, though it still falls far short of...

Researchers discovered a new Snatch ransomware strain that will reboot computers it infects into Safe Mode to disable any resident security solutions and immediately starts encrypting files once the system loads. Encrypting the victim's files is possible because most security tools are automatically disabled when Windows devices boot in Safe Mode as the Sophos Managed Threat Response (MTR) team and SophosLabs researchers found. Source: Bleeping Computer

The city of Pensacola is struggling to recover from a cyber attack that hit its computer network over the weekend. Some services are still affected but no critical ones. Few details are available but the attack prompted the city to disconnect much of its network until a solution for the problem was found. Source: Bleeping Computer

Due to recent changes in the Ryuk Ransomware encryption process, a bug in the decryptor could lead to data loss in large files. Ryuk is a ransomware infection known to target the enterprise or govt agencies by gaining access to their networks and then encrypting as many computers as possible. The attackers then demand large ransoms, sometimes in the millions, in order to receive a decryptor for their files. Source: Bleeping Computer