- Netwalker ransomware hits Pakistan’s largest private power utility
September 8, 2020
K-Electric, the sole electricity provider for Karachi, Pakistan, has suffered a Netwalker ransomware attack that led to the disruption of billing and online services. K-Electric is Pakistan’s largest power supplier, serving 2.5 million customers and employing over 10 thousand people. Starting yesterday, K-Electric customers have been unable to access the online services for their account. To resolve this ...
- Newcastle University students’ data held to ransom by cyber criminals
September 8, 2020
Newcastle University is being held to ransom by cyber criminals in an attack which has been disrupting IT systems since the beginning of the month. The cyber crime group behind the attack – known as DoppelPaymer – previously leaked documents online relating to Elon Musk’s companies SpaceX and Tesla. The criminals have posted stolen files from the ...
- Exposed Docker Server Abused to Drop Cryptominer, DDoS Bot
September 8, 2020
Malicious actors continue to target environments running Docker containers. We recently encountered an attack that drops both a malicious cryptocurrency miner and a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) bot on a Docker container built using Alpine Linux as its base image. A similar attack was also reported by Trend Micro in May; in that previous attack, threat ...
- Australia: Data of 186,000 customers leaked in Service NSW cyber attack
September 7, 2020
Service NSW has confirmed that the personal data of 186,000 customers and staff were leaked after a cyber attack earlier this year, in which 47 employees had their email accounts compromised. A four-month investigation, which began in April, concluded that roughly 3.8 million documents had to be analysed to assess the severity of any possible breaches. “This ...
- Chilean bank shuts down all branches following ransomware attack
September 7, 2020
BancoEstado, one of Chile’s three biggest banks, was forced to shut down all branches on Monday following a ransomware attack that took place over the weekend. “Our branches will not be operational and will remain closed today,” the bank said in a statement published on its Twitter account on Monday. Details about the attack have not been ...
- Ransomware attack halts Argentinian border crossing for four hours
September 6, 2020
Argentina’s official immigration agency, Dirección Nacional de Migraciones, suffered a Netwalker ransomware attack that temporarily halted border crossing into and out of the country. While ransomware attacks against cities and local agencies have become all too common, this may be a first known attack against a federal agency that has interrupted a country’s operations. According to a ...
- FBI issues second alert about ProLock ransomware stealing data
September 4, 2020
The FBI issued a second warning this week to alert US companies of ProLock ransomware operators stealing data from compromised networks before encrypting their victims’ systems. The 20200901-001 Private Industry Notification seen by BleepingComputer on September 1st comes after the MI-000125-MW Flash Alert on the same subject issued by the FBI four months ago, on May ...
- Thanos Ransomware: Destructive Variant Targeting State-Run Organizations in the Middle East and North Africa
September 4, 2020
On July 6 and July 9, 2020, we observed files associated with an attack on two state-run organizations in the Middle East and North Africa that ultimately installed and ran a variant of the Thanos ransomware. The Thanos variant created a text file that displayed a ransom message requesting the victim transfer “20,000$” into a ...
- XCSSET Update: Browser Debug Modes, Inactive Ransomware
September 4, 2020
In our first blog post that covered XCSSET, we discussed its relatively unique danger to Xcode developers and the way it took advantage of two macOS vulnerabilities to maximize what it can take from an infected machine. Our research into this incident is still ongoing, and in this blog post, we cover some other aspects of ...
- Digital Education: The cyberrisks of the online classroom
September 4, 2020
This past spring, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, online learning became the new norm as universities and classrooms around the world were forced to close their doors. By April 29, 2020, more than 1.2 billion children across 186 countries were impacted by school closures. Shortly after schools began to transition to emergency remote learning, it ...