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A word that has become synonymous with suspicious, illegal or unscrupulous online activity, it is hard to avoid bots being mentioned in one capacity or another in 2020. Now accounting for 50% of online traffic, bots and the legality of bots remains a misunderstood subject. Defined in layman’s terms as an automated tool that mimics human behaviour in order to generate a large amount of traffic, bots can be used for almost anything online, most...

Quentyn Taylor, Director of Information Security at Canon Europe Ltd. has shared his Rant of the Week with the Guru! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Cw7hZhhbTw&feature=youtu.be

by Nigel Stanley, CTO at TUV Rheinland Operational technology (OT) based solutions – where computerised systems control a physical output or detect a physical effect – have become an area of increased focus for cyber-attacks. This has now become a real concern for enterprises whose production systems, manufacturing plants, industrial control systems and processing infrastructure are under constant threat. Cyberattacks are a very real risk. Criminals have identified these OT systems as prime targets as...

Javvad Malik, Security Awareness Advocate at KnowBe4 has shared his Rant of the Week with the Guru! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbPzuWrLLqU&feature=emb_title

The New York City Police Department’s fingerprint database was hit with ransomware in October 2018, a local newspaper learned. The attack was brought in by a third-party vendor who was installing video equipment at the NYPD’s police academy when it connected its infected computer to the police network, according to the New York Post. Source: SC Magazine

Federal agencies reportedly had improper access to Social Security data belonging to 3,200 license holders. Source: Dark Reading

New malware created by Chinese-backed Winnti Group has been discovered by researchers at ESET while being used to gain persistence on Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) systems. The new malicious tool dubbed skip-2.0 can be used by the attackers to backdoor MSSQL Server 11 and 12 servers, enabling them to connect to any account on the server using a so-called "magic password" and hide their activity from the security logs. Source: Bleeping Computer

A malware infection has taken down the worldwide operations of an accounting software provider, with the company adamant that no client information has been breached. “On Monday, May 6, we started seeing technical anomalies in a number of our platforms and applications. We immediately started investigating and discovered the installation of malware,” an official statement from Wolters Kluwer said. Source: Accountants Daily

Avast (LSE:AVST), the global leader in digital security products, today announced that it discovered 50 adware apps on the Google Play Store using Avast’s mobile threat intelligence platform, apklab.io. The installations of the apps, which Avast is referring to as TsSdk, range from 5K to 5M installations. The adware persistently displays full screen ads, and in some cases, tries to convince the user to install further apps. The adware applications are linked together by the...

A group of hackers is using a previously undocumented backdoor program designed to interact with attackers over Slack. While abusing legitimate services for malware command-and-control purposes is not a new development, this is the first time researchers have seen Slack, a popular enterprise collaboration tool, being used in this way. The backdoor was detected by security firm Trend Micro in a targeted attack launched from the compromised website of an organization called the Korean American...