Cyber Bites

A town in Florida has paid $500,000 (£394,000) to hackers after a ransomware attack. The total paid by Florida municipalities over ransomware in the last two weeks now stands at $1.1m. Officials in Lake City voted to pay hackers in Bitcoin after suffering downed computer systems for two weeks. Coastal suburb Riviera Beach recently paid hackers $600,000 following a similar incident that locked municipal staff out of important files. Source: BBC News

Payment card fraud is being used around the world to fund and launder the proceeds from organised crime, drug and human trafficking, terrorism and more, according to a new report from Terbium Labs. The dark web intelligence firm analysed 274 cases over the past decade across North America and Europe to compile its new report, The Next Generation of Criminal Financing: How Payment Fraud Funds Transnational Crime. Source: Infosecurity Magazine

Tesco’s official Twitter account was subject to some unusual behaviour yesterday (24 June) evening, with social media users suggesting it had been hacked. For approximately two hours, @Tesco apparently morphed into a fake Bill Gates account – with the feed containing an image of the technology entrepreneur and philanthropist, a link to National Geographic magazine article on toilets, and a pinned tweet encouraging people to invest in Bitcoin. Source: Essential Retail

Over 2,000 devices have been bricked in the span of a few hours. Attacks still ongoing. A new strain of malware is wiping the firmware of IoT devices in attacks reminiscent of the old BrickerBot malware that destroyed millions of devices back in 2017. Source: ZDNet

The attack starts with an email and .xls attachment with content in the Korean language. Surprisingly, even if your Windows PC is fully patched, you might still be at risk. Office applications have always been the target for cybercriminals to attack Windows PCs and they are doing it yet again. New reports suggest about this new spread of malware via excel attachment in emails in macro. A macro is an action or a set of...

The world’s largest consumer drone maker also rebutted security concerns on its products, saying it does not collect customer data or send it back to China. DJI, the world's largest consumer drone maker, unveiled plans this week to assemble drones in California and make high-security drones for the US government. The plan follows the Chinese company in recent months being warned about security concerns by the US. Source: ZDNet

A scam that was discovered last month that involved cyber-criminals invading Microsoft Azure Cloud Services reportedly remains ongoing. According to Malwarebytes’ threat intelligence team, the scam has continued but with a new trick: utilizing paid search results. Source: Infosecurity Magazine

LockerGoga ransomware attack in March saw a return to pen-and paper drawings and fax communications between offices. Aluminium producer Norsk Hydro has revealed that it has had to resort to the use of pen and paper to continue business following a ransomware attack in March. According to a report by the BBC, "five weeks on, they're still recovering" and have had to dig out "long-since forgotten about paperwork". It was also revealed that workers have...

A new cryptocurrency-mining botnet malware is abusing Android Debug Bridge (ADB) and SSH, according to Trend Micro. “This attack takes advantage of the way open ADB ports don’t have authentication by default, similar to the Satori botnet variant. This bot’s design allows it to spread from the infected host to any system that has had a previous SSH connection with the host," the researchers wrote. Source: Infosecurity Magazine

Dominion National first spotted something awry in April 2019. Dental and vision insurance provider and administrator Dominion National has begun notifying patients of a data breach of its systems that apparently dates back to August 2010. The insurer said an incident investigation that began on April 24, 2019, led to the discovery that its servers had been compromised in an attack that began nearly nine years ago. See business health insurance for more information. Source:...