Cyber Bites

A hacker venturing to poison the Florida water system by tampering with the chemical levels. Fortunately nobody was harmed by the Oldsmar water treatment facility hack, due to the changes being spotted in time. The attempt, however, is a reminder to all organisations that their networks must be sufficiently secured against cyberattacks. This is especially important for systems that manage physical capabilities and can be remotely accessed. "What we can learn from this from a...

On Monday, Twitter announced its plan to introduce a new strike system to halt the spread of misinformation on the platform. The social media platform will start labelling tweets that "may contain misleading information about COVID-19 vaccines" and remove any that violate Twitter guidelines. The company has already removed thousands of tweets and examined over 11.5 million accounts that have been linked to the spread of false information on the platform. The plan is to...

Distributed Denial of Secrets announced that it will be revealing a collection of over 40 million posts from the far-right platform Gab. The group are calling the data reveal "GabLeaks". According to DDoSecrets a hacktivist who identifies as "JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project" collected Gab's data from the platforms backend databases with hopes of exposing many of the predominantly right-wing users. Gab has been popular with a number of controversial groups, such as...

The Go programming language is growing in popularity after being adopted by cybercriminals to build and design malware. The amount of malware strains coded using Go has increased by almost 2,000% since 2017. These findings have confirmed the trend that malware designers are moving away from C and C++ and towards news languages such as Go. Natalie Page, Threat Intelligence Analyst at Talion explained why rarer coding languages, such as Go, are more attractive to cybercriminals....

Attackers have been targeting AOL users in an attempt to steal login name and password with a phishing link. Many older people are still using AOL, because they find it too complicated to switch to a different email service such as Gmail or Outlook. This makes them prime targets for phishing scams, especially as AOL's email filters are not as efficient as those from other services. The email warned: "We noticed you haven't updated your...

A "technical failure" caused nearly 5 million homes in Mumbai to suffer power outages on the 13th of October 2020. Suburban train services and stock market operations were also affected, interrupting normal operations for several hours. Now, Recorded Future, a US-based cybersecurity company blames Beijing for the citywide outage. The Recorded Future report states: "10 distinct Indian power sector organisations, including 4 of the 5 Regional Load Despatch Centres (RLDC) responsible for operation of the...

According to the office of U.S. Senator Ron Wyden and a number of American security experts, Microsoft could have prevented some of the damage caused by the SolarWinds hack had they fixed known problems in the cloud software that facilitated the hack. As these issues were not fixed it resulted in at least nine federal government agencies being compromised. The vulnerability allowed hackers to fake the identity of government employees in order to gain access...

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has taken its servers offline after it was victim to a cyberattack by the DoppelPaymer ransomware gang. The Dutch Research Council is the main funding research body for institutes in the Netherlands, with investments of around one billion euros per year. They announced in early February that their network had been hacked, revealing information about the impact it had on their activity, but no information on the actual incident. It...

Npower, an energy provider owned by E.ON, one of the UK's biggest energy providers, removed its app after it experienced a cyberattack in which users' login data was stolen and used to access customer accounts. Although the energy provider has not yet revealed how many customers were affected by the breach, it has been speculated that users' contact information and some financial details may have been accessed, while MoneySavingExpert.com has said that full account numbers...

An Oxford University lab that has been researching the Covid-19 pandemic has been hacked. Forbes reported that Oxford University confirmed that an incident has been detected at the Division of Structural Biology. Since the attack was confirmed the university has contacted the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) who will now investigate the attack. A representative from the university said, "we have identified and contained the problem and are now investigating further.” They went on to...