Uncategorized

The head of GCHQ spoke to Sky News about a secret cyber operation, targeting the Islamic State. The mission of this operation is to target the group's ability to fly drones, meddle with their phones and affect their propaganda. General Sir Patrick Sanders has warned the UK, that social media is being used to sow division, spread conspiracy theories and "tear the fabric of society apart". Both sanders and Jeremy Fleming, director at GCHQ, spoke...

Version 88.0.4324.150 of the Chrome browser was released today. The new version, compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux contains a bugfix for a zero-day vulnerability. The vulnerability was assigned the identifier CVE-2021-21148. Google described it as a "heap overflow" memory corruption bug, which was exploited in attacks before Mattias Buelens found and reported the issue on the 24th of January. Google's security team published a report two days after Buelen's report, detailing attacks carried out...

Q4 of 2020 saw a decline in ransomware victims paying to recover their data. This is a result of being able to recover their data from backups, even if hackers threaten to leak the data before encryption. However, Coveware has picked up on a 'more insidious phenomenon' in which data is being destroyed during the attack. Companies have found this leaves them no option to recover the stolen data, even if they were to pay...

On Tuesday, Singapore passed the COVID-19 (Temporary Measures) (Amendment) Bill, under a Certificate of Urgency. This allows the government to introduce new legislations they deem to be urgent. This bill was passed as a result of public discontent after it was revealed that the police were able to access the country's Trace Together contact tracing app for their criminal investigations. This contradicted the government's previous statements, that the information on the app would only be...

The 1.4 million reports of identity theft throughout 2020 highlights the need for awareness surrounding this crime. 2020's surge in identity theft can actually be attributed to the nationwide dip in employment. Reportedly, cyber criminals targeted government funds meant for individuals and small businesses that were hard hit financially as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From February 1- February 5 the FTC and its partners will co-host a series of free events. This will...

As the transition to remote working has forced many companies' hands for increased or faster adoption of cloud services, One Identity has announced the availability of its new software-as-a-service (SaaS) identity governance and administration (IGA) and privileged access management (PAM) solutions. Based on the One Identity Security Platform and designed with the full IGA and PAM capabilities of its industry-leading solutions, the new SaaS offerings allow organisations to implement a Zero Trust model and are...

Florida Healthy Kids Corp, a children Medicaid health plan based in Tallahassee has discovered that it has been victim to a 7-year data breach. The health plan was first notified of the breach on 9th December 2020 and soon after launched an investigation into it. During the investigation, they found that there had been "significant vulnerabilities" in their website and databases which support the online children health insurance application since 2013. The vulnerabilities in their...

A serious vulnerability has been found in the latest version of GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG)'s free encryption software cryptographic library, Libgcrypt 1.9.0. Libgcrypt is GnuPG's general purpose cryptographic library GnuPG, but a number of other encryption software's also employ it. Libgcrypt 1.9.0 was originally been released last week, on 19th January 2021, and was supposed to be integrated into the latest GnuPG 2.3 release. However, Werner Koch, the author of Libgcrypt and the principal developer...

A new phishing tool kit has been developed by a cybercrime group which allows criminals to change text and logos in real-time on phishing pages in order to adapt to victims. The kit is called LogoKit, and according to it RiskIQ is has already been seen in use online. RiskIQ has said that the toolkit has been identified on over 300 domains in the past week alone, and more than 700 sites in the past...

New research from Seqrite has found that in 2020 there were 13,733 malware threats detected every hour. The report showed that of all threats Trojan malware threats were the leaders quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) and year-on-year (YoY). According to the research out of the 113 million malware detections, the first quarter totalled the highest at 36 million detections. It also showed that in the month of January there were the most malware attacks. Himanshu Dubey, Director, QuickHeal...