Education and Academia


  • China becomes main victim of advanced persistent threat attacks: Ministry of State Security

    September 16, 2023

    According to the Ministry of State Security on Saturday which is the 23rd National Defense Education Day, China has become the main victim of advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks, adding that cyberspace has become an important battleground for foreign intelligence agencies to conduct cyber espionage against China, Xinhua Daily Telegraph reported. The national security departments of ...

  • China: Identity of NSA hacker behind cyberattack on China’s leading aviation university identified

    September 14, 2023

    During the investigation of the cyberattack against Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU), a leading Chinese aviation university, China has successfully extracted multiple samples of the spyware named SecondDate, and with the collaborative efforts of partners in various countries, the real identity of the US’ National Security Agency (NSA) personnel responsible for launching the cyberattack on NPU ...

  • Personal Data Leaked After Cyber Attack on Maryland Schools

    August 28, 2023

    Prince George’s County, Md., Public Schools officials said some of the personal data stolen in a recent cyber attack has leaked online. The Washington, D.C., area school system is one of the 20 largest school districts in the U.S., with 201 schools and centers. The school system discovered an attack on its network on Aug. 14, ...

  • Connecticut city loses $6 million in multiple cyber attacks on public school district, manages to recoup half

    August 11, 2023

    The city of New Haven lost more than $6 million in multiple cyberattacks on its public school district earlier this summer and has so far managed to recoup about half of the money, officials announced Thursday. The thefts, which occurred in June and involved hackers impersonating the city’s chief operating officer and private vendors in emails, ...

  • New cyberattack method: tracking typing remotely via keyboard sounds

    August 7, 2023

    A group of British cybersecurity researchers has figured out a novel new attack method: recording the sound a computer keyboard makes. The researcher took recordings using a nearby smartphone of typists and used it to train a sound classification model, achieving accuracies of 95% to suss out the actual keys pressed. They call this an acoustic side ...

  • UT Dallas joins national effort to respond to cyber attacks on public infrastructure

    August 1, 2023

    UT Dallas last week announced it’s joining a nationwide collaboration to research how to make network-connected infrastructure — including self-driving cars, drones and Wi-Fi-connected trains — more resilient to cyber attacks. The Richardson-based university joins eight others selected for the National Center for Transportation Cybersecurity and Resiliency, or TraCR, led by Clemson University in South Carolina. ...

  • A defense against attacks on unmanned ground and aerial vehicles

    July 21, 2023

    A University of Texas at Arlington engineering researcher is working on defenses that could thwart cyberattacks against networks of self-driving cars and unmanned aerial vehicles. “If hackers find a way to affect 10 out of 100 self-driving cars in a given area, they might have an impact on all 100 cars because the 10 hacked cars ...

  • Major cyber attack at Scottish university as police and government called in

    July 7, 2023

    The University of the West of Scotland (UWS) said it is working with experts from the national cyber security centre, Police Scotland and the Scottish Government after its website was shut down for several days. A message on the site displays a message warning it is “currently down” for maintenance and apologises for any inconvenience. Read more… Source: ...

  • New technique can defeat voice authentication “after only six tries”

    June 30, 2023

    Voice authentication is back in the news with another tale of how easy it might be to compromise. University of Waterloo scientists have discovered a technique which they claim can bypass voice authentication with “up to a 99% success rate after only six tries”. In fact this method is apparently so successful that it is said ...

  • UK: Hacking gang BlackCat says it stole data trove from the Barts Health NHS Trust

    June 30, 2023

    A gang of cybercriminals says it has breached one of the UK’s largest hospital groups and is threatening to publish a trove of its confidential data. The gang, known as ALPHV or BlackCat, posted a statement on Friday claiming it had obtained seven terabytes of internal documents from the Barts Health NHS Trust, which manages five ...

  • North Korea Using Social Engineering to Enable Hacking of Think Tanks, Academia, and Media

    June 1, 2023

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the U.S. Department of State, and the National Security Agency (NSA), together with the Republic of Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), National Police Agency (NPA), and Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), are jointly issuing this advisory to highlight the use of social engineering by Democratic People’s Republic of Korea ...

  • Greece Orders Probe into Exam System Cyber-Attacks

    May 31, 2023

    Greece’s Supreme Court launched on Tuesday an urgent investigation into the cyber-attacks targeting the Greek high school exams that were interrupted two days running. Following a second cyber-attack on the data bank providing the exam questions, Supreme Court Public Prosecutor Isidoros Dogiakos ordered an investigation with the assistance of the Hellenic Police Cyber Crime Unit. Read more… Source: ...

  • Hot Pixels attack checks CPU temp, power changes to steal data

    May 27, 2023

    A team of researchers at Georgia Tech, the University of Michigan, and Ruhr University Bochum have developed a novel attack called “Hot Pixels,” which can retrieve pixels from the content displayed in the target’s browser and infer the navigation history. The attack exploits data-dependent computation times on modern system-on-a-chip (SoCs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) and ...

  • Dorchester school IT system held to ransom in cyber attack

    May 23, 2023

    A school has been left unable to use email or accept payments following a cyber attack. Thomas Hardye School in Dorchester said its screens and systems had been locked since being targeted on Sunday. It said the attack was accompanied by a ransom demand, payable on the dark web. Read more… Source: BBC News  

  • CISA and FBI Release Joint Advisory in Response to Active Exploitation of PaperCut Vulnerability

    May 11, 2023

    CISA and FBI have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), Malicious Actors Exploit CVE-2023-27350 in PaperCut MF and NG. This joint advisory provides details related to an exploitation of PaperCut MF/NG vulnerability (CVE-2023-27350). FBI observed malicious actors exploit CVE-2023-27350 beginning in mid-April 2023 and continuing through the present. In early May 2023, FBI observed a ...

  • After a Cyber Attack: Dos and Don’ts for Higher Education IT Staff

    May 10, 2023

    For most colleges and universities, it’s a question of when, not if, they will experience a cyber attack. Here are seven key considerations for handling the aftermath of a breach. There is a treasure trove of sensitive and valuable information in higher education information systems that is tantalizing to hackers of all kinds. With networks that ...

  • Intel CPUs vulnerable to new transient execution side-channel attack

    April 24, 2023

    A new side-channel attack impacting multiple generations of Intel CPUs has been discovered, allowing data to be leaked through the EFLAGS register. The new attack was discovered by researchers at Tsinghua University, the University of Maryland, and a computer lab (BUPT) run by the Chinese Ministry of Education and is different than most other side-channel attacks. Read ...

  • Medusa ransomware claims attack on Open University of Cyprus

    April 6, 2023

    The Medusa ransomware gang has claimed a cyberattack on the Open University of Cyprus (OUC), which caused severe disruptions of the organization’s operations. OUC is an online university based in Nicosia, Cyprus, that provides remote learning. It offers 30 higher-level education programs to 4,200 students and participates in various scientific research activities. Read more… Source: Bleeping Computer  

  • Hackers attack several Israeli university websites

    April 4, 2023

    The sites of Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Haifa University, Weizmann Institute of Science, Open University of Israel and Reichman University were among the sites inaccessible due to the cyberattack. The group posted a statement on its Telegram account, listing the attacked websites. “Infrastructure: Universities – Israel’s education sector ...

  • University of California targeted in cyber attack

    March 31, 2023

    The University of California said Wednesday that it was subject to a cyber attack that has compromised the personal information of some individuals in the university community. According to the ten-campus university system, the cyber attack “involves the use of Accellion, a vendor used by many organizations for secure file transfer, in which an unauthorized individual ...