News

The American cybersecurity giant Symantec has downplayed a data breach that allowed a hacker to access passwords and a purported list of its clients, including large Australian companies and government agencies. The list extracted in the February incident, seen by Guardian Australia, suggests that all major federal government departments were among the targets of a hacker who also claimed to be responsible for Medicare data being available for sale on the dark web. Source: The...

A decryptor for pyLocky Ransomware versions 1 and 2 has been released by French authorities that allows victim to decrypt their files for free. According to a post by the French Ministry of Interior,  this decryptor was created in collaboration between French law enforcement, the French Homeland Security Information Technology and Systems Service, and volunteer researchers. Source: Bleeping Computer

Nearly 1,000 employees in ASCO’s Zaventem, Belgium, office have been left incapable of doing their jobs after a ransomware attack crippled the aircraft-parts manufacturer, according to a June 11 report from vrt NWS. “From the ISF’s standpoint, everyone who has access to an organization’s information and systems should be made aware of the risks from ransomware and the actions required to minimize those risks,” said Steve Durbin, managing director of the Information Security Forum. Source:...

Poor governance and privacy concerns have knocked Facebook out of an influential ethics index that tracks socially responsible companies. The US stock market S&P 500's Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Index said that it had booted Facebook after the company scored poorly for social responsibility and governance, achieving 22 and 6, respectively, out of 100. Source: The Telegraph

UK businesses neglect poor password management practices and are failing to recognise the value of automated tools. OneLogin, the leading provider of Unified Access Management, has revealed UK businesses annually lose, on average, 2.5 months per year resetting passwords. The failure to manage passwords and mundane IT administrative tasks efficiently is costing businesses time and money. (Download the full password management report here). “The benefits of innovative technology to facilitate modern business practices is clearly...

ASCO, one of the world's largest suppliers of airplane parts, has ceased production in factories across four countries due to a ransomware infection reported at its plant in Zaventem, Belgium. As a result of having IT systems crippled by the ransomware infection, the company has sent home approximately 1,000 of its 1,400 workers. Source: ZDNet

Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh warns Marylanders their medical and other private information may have been compromised by a cyberattack against American Medical Collection Agency, a third party collection agency for laboratories, hospitals, physician groups, medical providers and others. AMCA’s payment system was compromised on August 1, 2018, according to the release, and remained vulnerable through March 30, 2019. Source: CBS Baltimore

Facebook is set to create 500 new jobs with the opening of a new engineering centre in central London. The majority of the new roles will be in Facebook’s Community Integrity team, which is focused on upholding safety and tackling abuse on the platform. Other responsibilities include building software and AI detection systems to locate and remove malicious content, fake accounts and other “harmful behaviour,” the company claimed. Source: i News

Users of Telegram Messengers in certain parts of the world had trouble exchanging messages through the service yesterday. The problems were caused by a distributed denial-of-service attack aiming at Telegram servers. The service outage affected users mainly in South and North America, although connection issues were present in other parts of the world as well. In a Twitter announcement, Telegram informed that its servers today were the target of a DDoS attack deployed by a...

The Irish regulator conducting nearly one dozen investigations into Facebook isn’t convinced by Mark Zuckerberg’s privacy push. The internet giant’s stock fell Wednesday after a report in the Wall Street Journal suggested the Facebook boss has previously been aware of potential issues with privacy, arising from the firm’s business practices. In a CNBC interview Wednesday, Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon said “it’s all going to remain to be seen” whether Facebook and CEO Mark...