- Boffins build microphone safety kit to detect eavesdroppers
September 12, 2022
Scientists from the National University of Singapore and Yonsei University in the Republic of Korea have developed a device for verifying whether your laptop microphone is secretly recording your conversations. The researchers – Soundarya Ramesh, Ghozali Suhariyanto Hadi, Sihun Yang, Mun Choon Chan, and Jun Han – call the device TickTock. That may suit a lab ...
- China strongly condemns US cyber attacks on China’s Northwestern Polytechnical University
September 6, 2022
China strongly condemns the cyber attacks launched by the United States on China’s Northwestern Polytechnical University, and urges the U.S. side to offer an explanation and immediately stop its unlawful moves, Foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Monday. It was reported that China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) and cybersecurity company 360 on Monday ...
- #StopRansomware: Vice Society
September 6, 2022
This joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) is part of an ongoing #StopRansomware effort to publish advisories for network defenders that detail various ransomware variants and ransomware threat actors. These #StopRansomware advisories include recently and historically observed tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and indicators of compromise (IOCs) to help organizations protect against ransomware. Visit stopransomware.gov to see ...
- Los Angeles school district says it was target of ransomware attack
September 6, 2022
The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest collection of public schools in the United States, said it was targeted by a ransomware attack over the Labor Day weekend that caused “significant disruption” but did not lead to cancellation of classes. “Los Angeles Unified detected unusual activity in its Information Technology systems over the weekend, which ...
- Nelnet Servicing breach exposes data of 2.5M student loan accounts
August 29, 2022
Data for over 2.5 million individuals with student loans from Oklahoma Student Loan Authority (OSLA) and EdFinancial was exposed after hackers breached the systems of technology services provider Nelnet Servicing. Technology services from Nelnet Servicing, including a web portal, are used by OSLA and EdFinancial to give online access students taking out a loan access to ...
- #StopRansomware: Zeppelin Ransomware
August 11, 2022
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are releasing this joint CSA to disseminate known Zeppelin ransomware IOCs and TTPs associated with ransomware variants identified through FBI investigations as recently as 21 June 2022. The FBI and CISA encourage organizations to implement the recommendations in the Mitigations section ...
- Microsoft seizes 41 domains tied to ‘Iranian phishing ring’
June 7, 2022
Microsoft has obtained a court order to seize 41 domains used by what the Windows giant said was an Iranian cybercrime group that ran a spear-phishing operation targeting organizations in the US, Middle East, and India. The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit said the gang, dubbed Bohrium, took a particular interest in those working in technology, transportation, ...
- FBI: Compromised US Academic Credentials Identified Across Various Public and Dark Web Forums
May 26, 2022
The FBI is informing academic partners of identified US college and university credentials advertised for sale on online criminal marketplaces and publically accessible forums. This exposure of sensitive credential and network access information, especially privileged user accounts, could lead to subsequent cyber attacks against individual users or affiliated organizations. Cyber actors continue to conduct attacks against US ...
- Ransomware attack exposes data of 500,000 Chicago students
May 21, 2022
The Chicago Public Schools has suffered a massive data breach that exposed the data of almost 500,000 students and 60,000 employee after their vendor, Battelle for Kids, suffered a ransomware attack in December. Ohio-based Battelle for Kids is a not-for-profit educational organization that analyzes student data shared by public school systems to design instructional models and ...
- US govt grants academics $12M to develop cyberattack defense tools
April 22, 2022
The US Department of Energy (DOE) has announced that it will provide $12 million in funding to six university teams to develop defense and mitigation tools to protect US energy delivery systems from cyberattacks. Cybersecurity tools developed as a result of the six university-led research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) projects will focus on detecting, blocking, and ...
- NATO sharpens technological edge with innovation initiatives
April 7, 2022
NATO Allies are launching a ground-breaking initiative to sharpen the Alliance’s technological edge. On Thursday (7 April 2022), Allied foreign ministers approved the Charter of the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic – or DIANA. “Working with the private sector and academia, Allies will ensure that we can harness the best of new technology ...
- Cyber attack on UK’s Defence Academy had ‘significant’ impact, officer in charge at the time reveals
January 2, 2022
A cyber attack – possibly by China or Russia – hit the academic arm of the UK’s Ministry of Defence and had a “significant” impact, the officer in charge at the time has revealed. Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who retired from the armed forces in August, said the “sophisticated” hack – discovered last March – prompted ...
- Honeypot experiment reveals what hackers want from IoT devices
December 22, 2021
A three-year-long honeypot experiment featuring simulated low-interaction IoT devices of various types and locations gives a clear idea of why actors target specific devices. More specifically, the honeypot was meant to create a sufficiently diverse ecosystem and cluster the generated data in a way that determines the goals of adversaries. IoT (Internet of Things) devices are a ...
- Medical school exposes personal data of thousands of students
November 3, 2021
A US medical training school exposed the personally identifiable information (PII) of thousands of students. On Wednesday, vpnMentor published a report on the security incident, in which an unsecured bucket was left exposed online. The server, which did not have authentication controls in place and was, therefore, accessible by anyone to view, contained 157GB of data, or ...
- ‘Trojan Source’ Hides Invisible Bugs in Source Code
November 1, 2021
Researchers have found a new way to encode potentially evil source code, such that human reviewers see a harmless version and compilers see the invisible, wicked version. Named “Trojan Source attacks,” the method “exploits subtleties in text-encoding standards such as Unicode to produce source code whose tokens are logically encoded in a different order from the ...
- FBI: Ranzy Locker ransomware hit at least 30 US companies this year
October 26, 2021
The FBI said on Monday that Ranzy Locker ransomware operators had compromised at least 30 US companies this year from various industry sectors. “Unknown cyber criminals using Ranzy Locker ransomware had compromised more than 30 US businesses as of July 2021,” the FBI said in a TLP: WHITE flash alert. “The victims include the construction subsector of ...
- Missouri Vows to Prosecute ‘Hacker’ Who Informed State About Data Leak
October 15, 2021
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper recently found a huge security blunder: The Missouri educational agency’s site was displaying 100,000+ clearly visible Social-Security numbers for school teachers, administrators and counselors in its HTML source code. The newspaper verified its findings with a cybersecurity professor and then informed the agency responsible for the leaking site – the Department ...
- US schools gave kids laptops during the pandemic. Then they spied on them
October 11, 2021
When the pandemic started last year, countless forms of inequality were exposed – including the millions of American families who don’t have access to laptops or broadband internet. After some delays, schools across the country jumped into action and distributed technology to allow students to learn remotely. The catch? They ended up spying on students. ...
- Is it OK to use stolen data? What if it’s scientific research in the public interest?
September 20, 2021
There’s a fine line between getting hold of data that may be in the public interest and downright stealing data just because you can. And simply because the data is out there – having been stolen by online intruders and then leaked – does not mean it is right to use it. A paper published in ...
- Operation SpoofedScholars: Iranian hackers posed as academics in a bid to steal email passwords
July 13, 2021
An Iranian cyber espionage campaign used spoofed identities of real academics at a UK university in phishing attacks designed to steal password details of experts in Middle Eastern affairs from universities, think tanks and the media. Detailed by cybersecurity researchers at Proofpoint, who’ve dubbed it Operation SpoofedScholars, the campaign also compromised a university-affiliated website in an ...
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