Education and Academia


  • Heriot-Watt University begins work on new £2.5m cyber attack station

    August 29, 2024

    Work has begun on the development of a new optical ground station at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The £2.5m facility will demonstrate and test satellite quantum secure communications and is scheduled to be fully operational by late autumn this year. The Quantum Communications Hub Optical Ground Station (HOGS) will help to tackle future cyberattacks by researching ...

  • Ransomware attacks on schools threaten student data nationwide

    August 26, 2024

    Imagine a criminal gaining unrestricted access to your child’s most private information — medical records, Social Security numbers and even details about their daily bus ride to school. This alarming scenario is becoming a reality for a growing number of families as sophisticated cybercriminals increasingly target schools across the United States, holding their computer systems ...

  • 5G network flaws could be abused to let hackers spy on your phone

    August 12, 2024

    5G basebands could be exploited by attackers to allow them to send fake messages to your contacts, or even hand over your credentials using a very real-looking website, experts have warned. Unveiled at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference, a research group from Pennsylvania State University presented their vulnerability sniffing tool 5GBaseChecker. Read more… Source: MSN News Sign up for ...

  • Microsoft IT outage linked to cyber security firm Crowdstrike hits airlines, railways, NHS and media outlets globally

    July 19, 2024

    The ‘most serious IT outage the world has ever seen’ sparked global chaos today – with planes and trains grounded, the NHS disrupted, shops closed, football teams unable to sell tickets and banks and TV channels knocked offline. The devastating technical fault caused Windows computers to suddenly shut down, prompting departure boards to immediately turn off ...

  • NATO releases revised AI strategy

    July 10, 2024

    On Wednesday (10 July 2024), NATO released its revised artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, which aims to accelerate the use of AI technologies within NATO in a safe and responsible way. AI or Artificial intelligence concept. It builds on one published in 2021 and takes account of recent advances in AI technologies, such as generative AI, and ...

  • Airports, Student Aid Services Struck by Indonesian Cyber Attack

    June 28, 2024

    Indonesia’s parliament called the government to task over another cyber attack that led to airport and scholarship services being put out of service. The ransomware attack that affected hundreds of ministries and public institutions was “catastrophic,” said lawmaker Tubagus Hasanuddin in a Thursday evening hearing with the communications minister and the head of state cybersecurity agency. ...

  • Sustained Campaign Using Chinese Espionage Tools Targets Telcos

    June 20, 2024

    Attackers using tools associated with Chinese espionage groups have breached multiple telecom operators in a single Asian country in a long-running espionage campaign. The attackers placed backdoors on the networks of targeted companies and also attempted to steal credentials. The attacks have been underway since at least 2021, with evidence to suggest that some of this ...

  • Data of over 20,000 staff, students at Chinese University of Hong Kong stolen after school server hacked

    June 14, 2024

    The personal data of over 20,000 Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) staff and students has been stolen after a server at one of the institution’s schools was hacked. The server of an online learning system used by CUHK’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies (CUSCS) was hacked on June 3, the school announced in a ...

  • Sapphire Werewolf polishes Amethyst stealer to attack over 300 companies

    June 5, 2024

    Since March 2024, the BI.ZONE Threat Intelligence team has been tracking the cluster of activity dubbed Sapphire Werewolf. The threat actor targets Russia’s industries, such as education, manufacturing, IT, defense, and aerospace engineering. Over 300 attacks were carried out using Amethyst, an offshoot of the popular open‑source SapphireStealer. The attackers disguise the malware as an enforcement ...

  • Western Sydney University staff, students caught in cyber attack

    May 21, 2024

    About 7500 staff and students have been caught up in a massive cyber attack at Western Sydney University. Police are investigating the breach, which the university says dates as far back as May 2023, when an unauthorised party got into the Microsoft Office system and accessed email accounts and SharePoint files. WSU says they have not ...

  • Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

    May 17, 2024

    A pair of university students say they found and reported earlier this year a security flaw allowing anyone to avoid paying for laundry provided by over a million internet-connected laundry machines in residences and college campuses around the world. Months later, the vulnerability remains open after CSC ServiceWorks repeatedly ignored requests to fix the flaw. Read more… Source: ...

  • SugarGh0st RAT Used to Target American Artificial Intelligence Experts

    May 16, 2024

    Proofpoint recently identified a SugarGh0st RAT campaign targeting organizations in the United States involved in artificial intelligence efforts, including those in academia, private industry, and government service. Proofpoint tracks the cluster responsible for this activity as UNK_SweetSpecter. SugarGh0st RAT is a remote access trojan, and is a customized variant of Gh0stRAT, an older commodity trojan typically ...

  • Thousands affected by cyber attack on Hong Kong college

    May 10, 2024

    Over 8,000 students of a private vocational college have been affected by a cyber attack, the privacy watchdog said on Friday. The Hong Kong College of Technology said its information technology network and file server were hacked in February. A ransomware group is believed to have got hold of 450GB of the college’s data and the ...

  • Cybersecurity researchers spotlight a new ransomware threat – be careful where you upload files

    April 26, 2024

    Today’s browsers are almost operating systems unto themselves. They can run software programs and encrypt files. These capabilities, combined with the browser’s access to the host computer’s files – including ones in the cloud, shared folders and external drives – via the File System Access API creates a new opportunity for ransomware. Imagine you want to ...

  • Universities Boost Spending to Curb Cyber Attacks

    April 25, 2024

    Higher education institutions have increased their cybersecurity budgets as more universities fall prey to cyber attacks, Moody’s Investor Service says in a report. The bond ratings agency reports that higher education institutions allocating a portion of their budget to cybersecurity increased more than 70 percent from 2019 to 2023. Despite the new spending jump, universities still ...

  • Singapore: Personal information of parents, staff at 127 schools accessed in data security breach

    April 20, 2024

    A data breach at one of its vendors has resulted in the “unauthorised access” of names and email addresses of parents and staff from five primary and 122 secondary schools, the Ministry of Education (MOE) said on Friday (Apr 19). MOE said it was notified by Mobile Guardian that its user management portal had been breached ...

  • Cybercrime Atlas: International effort to disrupt cybercrime moves into operational phase

    March 14, 2024

    The Cybercrime Atlas, a massive undertaking that aims to disrupt cybercriminals across the globe, enters its operational phase in 2024, two years after organizers laid the groundwork at the RSA Conference.… Its members now include 20-plus law enforcement agencies, private-sector security companies and incident responders, financial institutions, NGOs, and academics. Over the past year, the investigations ...

  • #StopRansomware: Phobos Ransomware

    February 29, 2024

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) are releasing this joint CSA, to disseminate known TTPs and IOCs associated with the Phobos ransomware variants observed as recently as February 2024, according to open source reporting. Phobos is structured as a ransomware-as-a-service ...

  • The Building Resilience to Cognitive Warfare Technical Exchange Meeting

    February 23, 2024

    In September 2023, MITRE hosted a Technical Exchange Meeting (TEM) titled Building Resilience to Cognitive Warfare with participants from MITRE, the Department of Defense, and the Australian Defense Force, whic h focused on securing the cognitive domain, including identifying national-level partnerships and innovation opportunities. This paper explores the emerging importance of cognitive security in the face ...

  • Cambridge faces cyber attack

    February 19, 2024

    The University faced a cyberattack yesterday (20/02), which is affected internet and services across multiple UK higher education institutions. Students at various colleges were notified of the attack, which affected access to IT services such as CamSIS and Moodle. An internal email revealed that the incident was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, described as ...