News

ProLock is relatively new, but already the ransomware is making waves by using QakBot infections to access networks, gain persistence and avoid detection. A relatively new ransomware, ProLock, has paired up with the QakBot banking trojan to access victims’ networks. ProLock’s leveraging of QakBot gives it bolstered persistence, anti-detection and credential-dumping techniques. ProLock ransomware first emerged in March as a successor to another recent malware strain, PwndLocker, and has made its mark targeting financial, healthcare,...

The plague of enterprises leaving cloud storage holding private data unprotected is starting to show up in the security statistics and is one of the few attacks on the rise, according to the Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report for 2020. That reality is both good and bad, said Gabe Bassett, senior information security data scientist at Verizon Enterprise. The bad news is that misconfiguration errors still exist. The good news is that companies are reporting...

The topic of the NHSX COVID-19 contact tracing app has been at the centre of many security debates lately. The discussion has been fuelled by security professionals, conspiracy theorists, and everyone in-between. However, many of the voices have not represented the British population that the application is designed to protect. With this in mind, Anomali, a cybersecurity company specialising in threat intelligence and analysis, conducted a survey of the British public in order to ascertain...

Multiple supercomputers across Europe have been infected this week with cryptocurrency mining malware and have shut down to investigate the intrusions. Security incidents have been reported in the UK, Germany, and Switzerland, while a similar intrusion is rumored to have also happened at a high-performance computing center located in Spain. The first report of an attack came to light on Monday from the University of Edinburgh, which runs the ARCHER supercomputer. The organization reported "security...

Multiple actors in the ransomware business saw the new coronavirus pandemic as the perfect opportunity to focus on an already overburdened healthcare sector. ProLock is yet another threat to the list. The FBI‌ issued a flash alert at the beginning of the month to alert organizations of the new threat actor, saying that its targets in the US include entities in the following sectors: healthcare, government, financial, and retail. The FBI does not encourage giving...

Australian transport giant Toll Group has revealed the extent of data theft it has suffered after its second bout of ransomware this year, following a January infection. "Our ongoing investigations have established that the attacker has accessed at least one specific corporate server. This server contains information relating to some past and present Toll employees, and details of commercial agreements with some of our current and former enterprise customers," the company said on Tuesday. "The...

 The Romanian law enforcement authorities arrested four cybercriminals that were planning to launch ransomware attacks on health care organizations in Romania. Three hackers were arrested in Romania and the fourth one was arrested in the Republic of Moldova. The hackers were charged for committing crimes of illegal operations with computer devices and programs, illegal access to a computer system, alteration of computer data integrity, and computer forgery. According to the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized...

The new Microsoft Edge browser is based on Chromium, the same engine that powers Google Chrome, so it’s capable of running any extension published in the Chrome Web Store. But at the same time, Microsoft also maintains its own add-on stores where the company says it’s only publishing recommended extensions that have been previously verified and validated for its browser. Only that just like it happens in the case of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox,...

Computer science is facing a crisis. To tackle the sector-wide skills gap Schaffhausen Institute of Technology (SIT) has created its new Master of Science (MSc) in Computer Science and Software Engineering to better prepare graduates for leadership. Launching in September 2020, the newly developed program is available for students with bachelor’s in computer science or software engineering who have ambitions to become the next generation of technical leaders. The Computer Science and Software Engineering MSc...

Elexon, a crucial middleman in the UK power grid network, reported that it fell victim to a cyber-attack earlier today. In a short message posted on its website, the company said the incident only impacted its internal IT network and employee laptops. The company's email server was also impacted and had been taken down, cutting employees off from crucial communications. Systems that managed the UK's electricity transit were unaffected, according to Elexon. In a subsequent...