Brazil probes emergency warning system after nationwide rogue alert


The Brazilian National Secretariat for Civil Protection and Defense (SEDEC) and Federal Police (PF) are investigating a suspected hack of the country’s emergency alert system after an unauthorized “extreme” alert pinged devices across the country.

Defesa Civil Nacional confirmed that its dispatch platform, often used to inform the public about severe weather events, was taken offline in the early hours of Saturday, June 20, after Brazilians reported the alert, which read: “Alerta extremo – Defesa Civil:misantropi4.”

“Misantropia” is Portuguese for misanthropy, hatred of humankind.

Read more…
Source:  The Register


Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox


Related:

  • A botnet has been cannibalizing other hackers’ web shells for more than a year

    August 21, 2019

    A major botnet operation has been attacking and taking over the web shells (backdoors on web servers) of other malware operations for more than a year, security researchers from Positive Technologies revealed today. Researchers linked the botnet to a former Windows trojan named Neutrino (also known as Kasidet), whose operators appear to have shifted from targeting desktop users ...

  • Hackers Planted Backdoor in Webmin, Popular Utility for Linux/Unix Servers

    August 20, 2019

    Following the public disclosure of a critical zero-day vulnerability in Webmin last week, the project’s maintainers today revealed that the flaw was not actually the result of a coding mistake made by the programmers. Instead, it was secretly planted by an unknown hacker who successfully managed to inject a backdoor at some point in its build ...

  • Newly Registered Domains: Malicious Abuse by Bad Actors

    August 20, 2019

    Newly registered domains (NRDs) are known to be favored by threat actors to launch malicious campaigns. Academic and industry research reports have shown statistical proof that NRDs are risky, revealing malicious usage of NRDs including phishing, malware, and scam. Therefore, best security practice calls for blocking and/or closely monitoring NRDs in enterprise traffic. Despite the evidence, there hasn’t yet ...

  • Post GandCrab, Cybercriminals Scouring the Dark Web for the Next Top Ransomware

    August 19, 2019

    A detailed look at underground forums shows that cybercriminals aren’t sure where to look on the heels of the GandCrab ransomware group shutting its doors – and low-level actors are taking advantage of that by developing their own strains. Ransomware continues to be a top threat, with Friday’s ransomware attack on 23 Texas local government and agencies and two ...

  • Adwind Remote Access Trojan Hits Utilities Sector

    August 19, 2019

    Attackers are targeting entities from the utility industry with the Adwind Remote Access Trojan (RAT) malware via a malspam campaign that uses URL redirection to malicious payloads. Adwind (also known as jRAT, AlienSpy, JSocket, and Sockrat) is distributed by its developers to threat actors under a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model and it is capable of evading detection by most major anti-malware ...

  • Hackers Use Fake NordVPN Website to Deliver Banking Trojan

    August 19, 2019

    The attackers who previously breached and abused the website of free multimedia editor VSDC to distribute the Win32.Bolik.2 banking Trojan have now switched their tactics. While previously they hacked legitimate websites to hijack download links infected with malware, the hackers are now creating website clones to deliver banking Trojans onto unsuspecting victims’ computers. This allows them to focus ...