Cyber Bites

Gartner anticipates that up to 75% of CEOs could be liable for IoT attacks due to an introduction of heightened regulations regarding "cyber-physical systems" (CPSs) and operational technology (OT). These so called CPSs, such as IoT attacks, are described as “engineered to orchestrate sensing, computation, control, networking and analytics to interact with the physical world, including humans” by Gartner in their report. Cyber-attacks have increasingly lead to human casualties rather than simply service outages or...

The New York Times reported breaking story that Norway’s parliament was hit by a ‘significant’ cyberattack. As of yet we are unsure what the reason or motive was but a "limited number" of lawmakers and employees were impacted, and have been informed. Several members and staff of Norway's main opposition Labour Party were affected, a party spokesman told public broadcaster NRK. Javvad Malik, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4: Nearly all organisations and governments rely on...

A new trojan malware family has been identified by researchers that targets cryptocurrency. Researchers at ESET said the: "previously undocumented trojan malware family spreads through malicious torrents and that uses multiple tricks to squeeze as many cryptocoins as possible from its victims while staying under the radar." ESET named the threat KryptoCibule, and it primarily targets users in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. “The malware, as written, employs some legitimate software. Some, such as Tor...

Slack, the communication and collaboration platform, has been gaining attention lately as a potential phishing platform and it has been targeted by malicious actors. Mainly bad actors have been developing various methods to phish users within the platform itself - with concerns ranging from DMs to Slackbot reminders and public Slack channels or workspaces. In a blog, Eric Howes from KnowBe4 said, "Much of that ongoing discussion is focused on the use of publicly leaked...

Cybercriminals have their eyes set on exploiting Fortnite, the world's most popular game, with stolen data from this game fetching for high prices on the dark web and other underground web forums. Hackers have been known to use automated software that can check for stolen credentials and whether these match up with those used by Fortnite gamers - some get scan up to 500 accounts per second. Once these details are matched, they are then...

Elon Musk has confirmed that Russian hackers were plotting cyberattacks against the Tesla factory in Nevada. Just this week, US authorities had arrested a Russian national for trying to lure an employee to plant malware on the network for a $1 million reward. Initially, the court indictment did not name the company, but a lot of speculation from the automobile/electric car industry led many to believe it was Tesla that was the target due to...

A new report by RiskIQ has shown that the cost of cybercrime per-minute will cost organisations $11.4 million by the year 2021. This global trend shows that there is a YOY increase of more than $2 every minute to total $24.7 - a 100% increase from 2015. Given the surge in cybercriminal activity during the current global pandemic, with hackers exploiting the fear and confusion that COVID-19 has brought, cyber threats will continue to mount....

A new artificial intelligence technique has been created to protect medical devices from malicious operating instructions in a cyberattack as well as other human and system errors. Tom Mahler, a researcher at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, presented his research, “A Dual-Layer Architecture for the Protection of Medical Devices from Anomalous Instructions” on August 26 at the 2020 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME 2020). Complex medical devices such as CT (computed...

Clar Rosso has been appointed the new Chief Executive Officer of (ISC)² and will take up the new role from 1 October when she leaves the AICPA & CIMA, where she is executive vice president of engagement and learning innovation,   “Cybersecurity professionals play a critical role in our global society, and I look forward to joining the dedicated team at (ISC)2 to strengthen our value to members and associates through our certification programs, enriching learning experiences and much...

In July, Russian citizen Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, a 27 year old Russian, was identified as a member of a wider Russian cybercriminal gang, seeking to extort a Nevada company through malware. Kriuchkov offered the employee of a major company $1,000,000 to install malware on corporate networks while the Russian gang would distract security teams with a DDoS attack. However, this plan failed when the employee revealed the scheme to the FBI. On Saturday, the FBI...