Cyber Bites

Cybercrime has become the worst threat to every company in the world. It is estimated that about 54 per cent of companies globally, experience at least one cyber attack every year. In Nigeria, it is even a menace that appears to have defied any solution. This is despite the array of solution providers in the market. Both large and small organisations in the country fall victim to cyber attacks on daily basis, losing valuable data,...

Hackers are leveraging Termite and EarthWorm, packet relay tools written by an employee of Beijing-based security research firm 360Netlab, to create a botnet of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, according to a report by AT&T Cybersecurity (formerly AlienVault). Source: Tech Republic

Security researchers have been aware of the OceanLotus hacking and cyber espionage group since at least 2015, but new information about the scope of the group's operations were revealed here at RSA. Researchers are now confident the group has been running a sophisticated fake news operation targeting activists in Vietnam. Source: PC Mag

Facebook has taken down more than 130 British accounts, groups and pages that it claims were part of a UK-based 'fake news' network. The pages posed as both far-right and anti-fascist outlets in a co-ordinated attempt to 'manipulate' the political debate in Britain, said Facebook head of cybersecurity Nathaniel Gleicher. He said the 137 accounts, which had more than 180,000 followers, deliberately used hate speech and misinformation in a bid to spread division on social networks. Source:...

Researchers at the penetration testing specialists invested nearly £4,000 ($5,000) in high-end smart car alarms systems in order to put them to the test. Ken Munro, the founder of Pen Test Partners, explains that an advert by one of the vendors concerned and stating the system was unhackable had piqued interest initially. That's never a great claim to make as any security expert will tell you that there is no such thing as being 100% secure. Unsurprisingly,...

The security community has seen its share of mistakes made by cybercriminals and quickly took advantage to stop the threat. But some of them have reached blooper level. A phishing email caught recently delivered the victim not some sort of a malicious payload, as one would expect, but the executable of the legitimate PowerShell command line utility found in Windows operating system.To eliminate all confusion, the command line tool was the genuine one available in...

The number of confirmed data breaches during 2018 reached 12,449, a 424% increase when compared with 2017, 47% of all compromised identity records having been exposed in breaches experienced by organizations from the United States and China. 4IQ, the identity intelligence company which published this report on the breached data landscape and trends, also discovered that, while the number of breaches saw a substantial boost last year, the average breach sized decreased to 216,884 records, a value 4.7 times smaller than...

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that the company will rebuild many of its services around encryption and privacy. The changes will take years, Zuckerberg said, with the ultimate end-goal being the creation of a privacy-focused social platform that blends the community of a public social network with the intimacy and security of private messaging on WhatsApp.  Source: ZDNet

1 ,000 Americans were asked some fundamental questions about their personal cybersecurity. The results are both riveting and depressing. 17.6 percent of these Americans admitted that their identities had, indeed, been stolen. Only 17.6 percent, I hear you sniff. It seems that every day there's yet another security breach that releases millions of personal details to the underworld, the netherworld and the four corners of cyberworld.

Administrators of Cisco switches, firewalls, and security appliances are advised to take a look at the latest collection of security advisories published by the company, as chances are good they will need to implement some updates. None of the fixed vulnerabilities are critical or exploited in the wild, but most are high-risk and should be plugged as soon as possible. Source: Help Net Security