Today’s interdependent and interconnected world requires joint efforts and holistic approaches to protect critical infrastructure assets from the growing number of attacks and to address ever-evolving cyber threats to government, energy, healthcare, education, banking, transportation, telecommunication and other critical sectors.
With a dedicated section focusing on Critical Infrastructure protection, we aim to enhance cooperation and engage security professionals through news, articles and in-depth analysis of emerging threats and technologies.
NEWS
- Ransomware is growing at an alarming rate, warns GCHQ chief
April 23, 2021
The scale and severity of ransomware is growing at an alarming rate as cyber criminals look to exploit poor cybersecurity to maximise profit, the director of GCHQ has warned. Organisations and their employees have been forced to adapt to different ways of working over the last year, with many now even more reliant on remote services ...
- New US Justice Department team aims to disrupt ransomware operations
April 22, 2021
The US Department of Justice (DoJ) is forming a new task force to deal with the “root causes” of ransomware. In an internal memo, the DoJ outlines the creation of a new initiative that will bring together current efforts in federal government to “pursue and disrupt” ransomware operations. As noted by CNN, this could include the takedown ...
- White House: Here’s what we’ve learned from tackling the SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange Server cyber incidents
April 21, 2021
Lessons learned from responses to the SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange cyber incidents will be used to coordinate action against future cybersecurity and hacking incidents, the White House has said. Both incidents required the United States to react to cyberattacks by nation-state hacking operations affecting thousands of organisations across the country – Russian intelligence compromised SolarWinds in ...
- Pulse Secure VPN zero-day used to hack defense firms, govt orgs
April 20, 2021
Pulse Secure has shared mitigation measures for a zero-day authentication bypass vulnerability in the Pulse Connect Secure (PCS) SSL VPN appliance actively exploited in attacks against worldwide organizations and focused on US Defense Industrial base (DIB) networks. To mitigate the vulnerability tracked as CVE-2021-22893 (with a maximum 10/10 severity score), Pulse Secure advises customers with gateways ...
- Just What The Cyber Doctors Ordered – OT For Pharmaceutical Companies
April 20, 2021
Several digital attacks against pharmaceutical companies have made news in the past few years. Back in 2017, for instance, Merck fell victim to NotPetya. The wiper malware spread to the pharmaceutical giant’s headquarters, rendered years of research inaccessible, affected various production facilities and caused $1.3 billion in damages, according to Bloomberg News. A couple of ...
- Government intervenes in sale of UK chip designer Arm over national security implications
April 19, 2021
A “high-level manager” of the FIN7 hacking group has been sentenced to ten years in prison. The planned $40bn (£29bn) sale of UK-based chip designer Arm Holdings will be scrutinised by regulators over potential national security concerns after an intervention by the government. Digital secretary Oliver Dowden has stepped in after current owner, Japanese conglomerate Softbank, agreed ...
- The Security dilemma of smart factories [Part 3] Fundamental security risks in robot languages
April 19, 2021
Industrial robots are the core of the automation of manufacturing processes in smart factories, and are the most important components as they support the manufacture of all kinds of products such as automobiles, aircraft, processed foods, and pharmaceuticals. In addition, as equipment that realizes unmanned manufacturing in the post-COVID-19 world where minimal or no contact ...
- NSA: 5 Security Bugs Under Active Nation-State Cyberattack
April 16, 2021
The Feds are warning that nation-state actors are once again after U.S. assets, this time in a spate of cyberattacks that exploit five vulnerabilities that affect VPN solutions, collaboration-suite software and virtualization technologies. According to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), which issued an alert Thursday, the advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as APT29 (a.k.a. ...
- White House launches plan to protect US critical infrastructure against cyber attacks
April 15, 2021
The White House is reportedly moving swiftly forward with a plan to harden the security of the US power grid against hacking attacks. According to Bloomberg, the Biden administration has a plan to dramatically improve how power utilities defend themselves against attacks from countries considered to be adversaries in cyberspace – such as Russia, Iran, North ...