News

UK cyber-security firm Sophos reported detecting a spike in ransomware attacks at the end of last week from a new strain named MegaCortex. Sophos said the ransomware appears to have been designed to target large enterprise networks as part of carefully planned targeted intrusions --in a tactic that is known as "big-game hunting." The modus operandi is not new and has been the preferred method of delivering ransomware for almost half a year. Source: ZDNet

Security researchers brought to life and released a wicked variant of Clippy, the recently resurfaced assistant in Microsoft Office that we all loved so much to hate, that makes it more difficult to detect a malicious macro in documents. Dubbed Evil Clippy, the tool modifies Office documents at file format level to spew out malicious versions that get by the static analysis of antivirus engines and even utilities for manual inspection of macro scripts. Source: BleepinComputer

The majority of C-Suite executives and policy makers in the United States believe investing in security software, infrastructure and emerging technologies is critical to protecting U.S. data from growing cybersecurity risks, according to a new survey. Source: Helpnetsecurity

Design flaws in smart home Internet of Things (IoT) devices that allow third parties to prevent devices from sharing information have been identified by researchers at North Carolina State University. The flaws can be used to prevent security systems from signaling that there has been a break-in or uploading video of intruders. Source: Helpnetsecurity

A Ukranian man has been extradited to the U.S. after being arrested last year in The Netherlands in relation to a massive online malvertising scheme. Oleksii Petrovich Ivanov, 31 was charged in December, but details of his arrest and the allegations against him have only been revealed following his extradition last week. Source: Silicon Angle

The second largest illicit market on the Dark Web, Wall Street Market (WSM) has been seized by law enforcement, and three of its alleged operators have been arrested in Germany.The arrests are the latest in a series of chaotic events surrounding the now-defunct WSM in which unknown individuals who ran the site performed an "exit scam" that found them making off with over $12.4 million USD in Bitcoins from WSM merchants. Source: Tech Republic

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has launched a physical attack on Hamas in immediate response to an alleged cyber-assault. The IDF hit a building in the Gaza Strip with an airstrike after claiming the site had been used by Hamas cyber operatives to attack Israel’s cyber space. The IDF claimed it stopped the attack online before launching its airstrike on Hamas. It claims it has now wiped out Hamas’ cyber operational capabilities. Source: Forbes

Incidents in public cloud infrastructure are more likely to happen because of a customer’s employees rather than actions carried out by cloud providers, according to a new Kaspersky Lab report –‘Understanding security of the cloud: from adoption benefits to threats and concerns’. Companies expect cloud providers to be responsible for the safety of data stored on their cloud platforms. However, around 90% (SMBs (88%) and enterprises (91%)) of corporate data breaches in the cloud happen...

A recent cyber disruption to the U.S. grid involved a "denial of service condition" at a Western utility, according to a Department of Energy official. On March 5, an unidentified power company fell victim to a "cyber event" that interfered with operations but stopped short of causing blackouts, according to a DOE filing this week. A DOE official confirmed yesterday that the event "did not impact generation, the reliability of the grid or cause any...

German police, together with Europol and law enforcement agencies from the US, the Netherlands, and Romania, have seized the servers of a dark web marketplace known as the Wall Street Market, on which users sold illegal products such as drugs, weapons, user credentials, and hacking tools, ZDNet has learned. The site's seizure comes after a tumultuous two weeks for the Wall Street Market (WSM) and its users, during which the site's administrators have exit-scammed --ran away...