News

EMCOR Group (NYSE: EME), a US-based Fortune 500 company specialized in engineering and industrial construction services, disclosed last month a ransomware incident that took down some of its IT systems. The incident took place on February 15 and was identified as an infection with the Ryuk ransomware strain. Details of the attack and the aftermath are not public, but the message announcing the ransomware infection is still present on the company's website almost three weeks...

  Clothing giant J.Crew said an unknown number of customers had their online accounts accessed “by an unauthorized party” almost a year ago, but is only now disclosing the incident. The company said in a filing on Tuesday with the California attorney general that the hacker gained access to the customer accounts in or around April 2019. According to the letter, the hacker obtained information found in customers’ online accounts — including card types, the...

  In a brief blog post here published on Monday in English and Chinese, Qihoo said it discovered the spying campaign by comparing samples of malicious software it had discovered against a trove of CIA digital spy tools released by WikiLeaks in 2017. Qihoo - a major cybersecurity vendor whose research is generally followed for the insight it offers into China’s digital security world - said the Central Intelligence Agency had targeted China’s aviation and...

  A new credential-stealing malware, dubbed ForeLord, has been uncovered in a recent spear phishing campaign. Researchers tie the attack to a known advanced persistence threat (APT) group known as Cobalt Ulster. The emails distributing ForeLord were uncovered as part of a campaign, running between mid-2019 and mid-January 2020. The emails were targeting organizations in Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, as well as global government organizations and unknown entities in Georgia and Azerbaijan, researchers said last week...

  A highly sensitive military database containing the personal details of tens of thousands of Australian Defence Force (ADF) members was shut down for 10 days due to fears it had been hacked. The ABC can reveal Defence Force Recruiting's outsourced electronic records system was taken offline and quarantined from other military networks in February, while IT specialists worked to contain an apparent security breach. Source: Abc

  In February, Google threw 600 apps out of its Play store. Amongst those was an app called Clean Master, a security tool promising antivirus protection and private browsing. It had more than 1 billion installs before it was evicted and, despite Google’s ban, is one of Android’s most downloaded apps ever and is  likely still running on millions of phones. Source: Forbes

Some well-known websites could stop functioning properly on Wednesday, 4 March, after a bug was found in the digital certificates used to secure them. The organisation that issues the certificates revealed that three million need to be immediately revoked. Visitors to affected sites will be greeted with an alert warning them the site is insecure. Source: BBC

According to data collected by Griffin Law 1,524,449 fake emails, calls and text messages claiming to be from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs were reported to HMRC between 2018 and 2019.   Fraudulent correspondence purporting to be from HMRC is nothing new, but their delivery appears to have changed.   Scams in the form of SMS text messages, otherwise known as smishing, have increased by 56% from 36,950 to 57,579 whereas email scams, or phishing,...

  The email addresses and travel details of about 10,000 people who used free wi-fi at UK railway stations have been exposed online. Network Rail and the service provider C3UK confirmed the incident three days after being contacted by BBC News about the matter. The database, found online by a security researcher, contained 146 million records, including personal contact details and dates of birth. Source: BBC

  Some customers of credit history-building tool Loqbox have had personal and financial data compromised after the firm was hit by a "sophisticated and complex" cyber attack. Loqbox is a tool which helps those with patchy credit histories build a credit score by buying a 'digital voucher' – essential a loan – and then 'repaying' it by saving a set amount into a Loqbox account each month. Source: Money Saving Expert