Cyber Bites

British Airways have been fined £20 million by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) following a data breach from 2018 which affected 400,000 customers. The 2018 breach affected customers confidential personal and credit card data. The incident happen when British Airway's systems were compromised by attackers, who modified customer details when they were inputted in order to harvest them. ICO originally intended to fine British Airways £183 million in 2019 over this issue, however, they have...

Zoom has recently announced it will be making it's end-to-end encryption capabilities available to all users, which will enhance the security of both voice and video calls immensely. Zoom's head of security engineering, Max Krohn, revealed that the first of the four-phase security roll-out will start next week. Zoom has previously been criticised for only making end-to-end encryption available to paying customers. The latest capabilities will be available to free and paying users and can...

One of the biggest BBQ chain restaurants in America, Dickey's has suffered a huge breach, leaking the card details of more than 3 million customers. This information was posted on Joker's Stash, a carding and fraud forum. A cybersecurity firm called Gemini Advisory, who track financial fraud made the initial discovery of the breach. The company was made aware of this breach earlier in the week when cybercriminals began advertising the mass collection of customer...

Twitter experienced a major outage on Thursday caused by an 'inadvertent change' made to their internal systems. The outage affected users worldwide as they were unable to use the platform for over an hour, while many also received error messages. Reports of the issues began at around 21:30 GMT on Thursday night. The website's service was restored later on Thursday night, with Twitter announcing that the website should be running as normal for all users....

An Iranian hacking group have resurfaced just in time for the start of the new term, unleashing phishing scams on academic institutions. These attacks are aimed at both staff and students as the activity within university portals picks up again. The attacks are sent to the victim's email and contain a link to a website that is made to look official. Some links are also redirecting victims to associated apps like library portals. Once the...

A Telso survey has recently found that organizations are finding it difficult to meet current IT security and compliance regulations. The survey of 300 IT security professionals taking place between July and August 2020 discovered that organizations are having to comply to 13 different IT security and privacy regulations which results in them having to spend $3.5 million on compliance activities per year. They also found that in order to try to meet these regulations...

Popular US book store Barnes and Nobles is the latest establishment to suffer from a cyber attack. Although no financial information was stolen during the breach, the hackers could have gotten away with customer emails, addresses and phone numbers if they were provided. This incident follows on from a system failure the company reported on Monday. However, they have not said the two incidents are linked. https://www.slashgear.com/barnes-noble-hack-exposes-customers-email-purchase-history-14642679/  

Several Twitter accounts claiming to be owned by Black Trump supporters have been suspended for breaking the platform's rules on spam and manipulation. Many of the accounts were using similar language and phrases such as "YES IM BLACK AND IM VOTING FOR TRUMP!!!". Twitter is still investigating the accounts and has yet to finalise the number of accounts it has suspended relating to this issue. Darren Linvil, a social media disinformation researcher has found more than...

North Caroline has recently created a cybercrime hotline for their state residents after a rise in cyber-scams. Residents of North Caroline have been targetted with COVID-19 related cyber-scams which has resulted in state residents losing millions of dollars. The NC 2-1-1 hotline is free and is one of the first to launch in the US, being funded by federal and state grants. Residents of North Carolina have been victims of fraud schemes such as fake...

Yesterday Ine Eriksen Søreide, Norway's Minister of Foreign Affairs, revealed that Russia was behind the cyber-attack on the Norwegian Parliament (Stortinget) in August 2020. The attacks in August resulted in hackers gaining access to email accounts of Stortinget representatives and employees, with data being stolen from these accounts. Although it is disclosed what data was stolen, a statement from the Center Party confirmed that those employees involved in the attack were impacted by it. Jarle...