Cyber Bites

The US is blaming Iran for the email shot sent from the far-right group, Proud Boys, urging Democratic voters to vote for Trump. In these emails, the extremist group where threatening registered Democrats with consequences if they didn't vote for Trump in the upcoming election. Although the group claimed to have sent this email to all registered Democrats, it was only sent to those registered in the Alaska, Arizona and Florida. In a press conference,...

Attention all Chrome users - you should update your browser to the latest version released yesterday. Google released this version of Chrome to patch several high-severity security issues. These included a 0-day vulnerability that has been used by hackers on targeted computers. The vulnerability was found by Sergei Glazunov, a security researcher at Google's Project Zero on the 19th of October. https://thehackernews.com/2020/10/chrome-zeroday-attacks.html

Montreal's transport system, Montreal's Société de Transport de Montréal (STM) has been attacked with ransomware called 'RansomExx'. On 19th October, the systems suffered from an outage which affected its IT systems, customer services and website. Although the outage didn't impact the running of buses and metros, it did affect disabled passengers from booking door-to-door services. STM announced on 20th October that the outage experienced the day before was in fact due to a ransomware attack...

Mike Pezzullo, Australia's secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, has voiced concerns about Facebook's plans to form an online space for nefarious activity. Pezzullo told the Senate Estimates that "we are particularly concerned about Facebook's plans to go to the end to end encryption of their entire platform to create, in effect, the world's biggest dark web". On Tuesday, Mike Pezzullo joined members of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) at the Senate Estimates in...

Abobe is testing a new method to help fight deep fakes by securely watermarking digital assets on Photoshop to ensure proper attributions are being used on digital media, according to a blog post by Adobe on Tuesday. The new watermarking function is part of the industries efforts to improve authentication of authorship in order to combat deep fakes and generally misleading material disseminating across the internet. Adobe will be adding the feature to Photoshop as...

Google is removing the Trusted Contacts app from the Play store. This app allowed users to nominate certain contacts to track their location as well as providing their location when they didn't respond. Instead of this app, Google has integrated a similar software into Google Maps. However, in this reimagined version, users need to have location sharing on at all times or for an allocated amount of time for sharing to be possible. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54600095

The US Department of Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has issued its first penalty to a cryptocurrency mixing service. Both Helix and Coin Ninja have been fined $60 million by the US Treasury. The FinCEN fine was issued to Larry Deam Harmon, the founder of Coin Ninja and Helix cryptocurrency mixers. The fines were issued after Coin Ninja and Helix violated the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) while operating their services as unregistered money services...

The UK government has released a statement outlining how Russian hackers were intending to attack the Tokyo Olympics. Their plans were to target the organisers, logistics and sponsors. Such attacks have already been carried out on previous Olympic Games, including the Winter Olympics in 2018. During this cyberattack, hackers released malware called OlympicDestoryer that attacked the server during the open ceremony. It is believed that a similar attack was planned for the Tokyo Games, which...

Twitter has recently updated their 'Hacked Materials' policy which resulted in users being blocked after sharing a link to a New York Post article regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The policy was blocking Twitter users from sharing the news article as the content of the article has been acquired following a hack. Twitter's Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead, Vijaya Gadde, said that the posts will be flagged as containing materials...

Researchers at Princeton University have conducted a study looking into the psychological tricks and dark patterns used by US political candidates. The aim of the study was to understand how these tactics were used in emails and whether they were successful in getting voters to sign up for rallies, donate or vote. The study analysed over 100,000 emails sent from December 2019 to June 2020. A preliminary analysis has been published however, the full report...