Government

February 13, 2020

A phishing scam has swindled a Puerto Rico government agency out of more than $2.6 million, according to reports. According to reports, the email-based phishing scam hit Puerto Rico’s Industrial Development Company, which is a government-owned corporation aimed at driving economic development to the island along with local and foreign investors. The agency reportedly received an email alleging ...

February 3, 2020

Today McAfee released the results of a survey of county websites and county election administration websites in the 13 states projected as battleground states in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections. We found that significant majorities of these websites lacked the official government .GOV website validation and HTTPS website security measures to prevent malicious actors from launching copycat web domains ...

December 29, 2019

The Government is facing fines and a compensation bill running into millions of pounds after the disclosure of the home addresses of counter-terrorism experts, senior police officers and celebrities on the new year honours list. Senior figures demanded an exhaustive inquiry into the circumstances which led to the personal details of more than 1,000 individuals who will ...

December 19, 2019

Frankfurt, one of the largest financial hubs in the world and the home of the European Central Bank, has shut down its IT network this week following an infection with the Emotet malware. Frankfurt is the fourth German entity that shut down its IT network in the past two weeks because of Emotet. The other three are ...

December 11, 2019

Overall awareness of the need for security measures is growing, and cybercriminals are increasing the precision of their targeting to locate victims with security breaches in their defense systems. Looking back at the past three years, the share of users targeted with ransomware in the overall number of malware detections has risen from 2.8% to 3.5%. While ...

December 10, 2019

The city of Pensacola, Fla., said it has been hit by a cyberattack that shut down the city’s computer networks and affected its systems. The attack occurs just days after a shooting occurred Friday at U.S. military base Naval Air Station Pensacola, leaving three dead. Pensacola’s mayor, Grover Robinson, told news outlets that he didn’t know if the cyberattack was ...

December 9, 2019

Beijing has ordered every public institution in the country to remove foreign computer equipment and software within three years, according to the Financial Times. The newspaper reported that the order was made by the Chinese Communist Party’s central office earlier this year, and is the first publicly known directive obliging government offices to begin purchasing equipment ...

November 20, 2019

The UK House of Commons is looking to appoint a new Director of Cyber Security for the Parliamentary Digital Service. A contract notice published on the Civil Service Jobs website stated that the selected candidate will have to take overall responsibility for the Palace of Westminster’s cybersecurity strategy. Work involves maintaining awareness of both internal and external ...

November 19, 2019

A ransomware infection today took down IT systems and websites managed by the Louisiana state government, Governor John Bel Edwards revealed in a series of tweets. “Today, we activated the state’s cybersecurity team in response to an attempted ransomware attack that is affecting some state servers. The Office of Technology Services identified a cybersecurity threat that ...

November 15, 2019

Lizard Squad, the well-known hacktivist cybergang, is pledging to mount personal cyberattacks on Britain’s Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. As the UK continues to be roiled by Brexit debate ahead of a Dec. 12 general election, the Labour Party said on Tuesday that it had been targeted by a “sophisticated and large-scale” cyberattack bent on taking ...

November 12, 2019

Labour says it has been hit by a “sophisticated and large-scale cyber attack” on its digital platforms. A party spokeswoman said the cyber attack “failed” because of their “robust security systems” and that she was confident no data breach occurred. “Security procedures have slowed down some of our campaign activities, but these were restored this morning and we ...

November 5, 2019

Canadian government IT systems have been forced into lockdown after a successful ransomware attack. On Monday, government officials for the Nunavut region said that over the weekend, a “new and sophisticated type of ransomware” struck the territory. All government services — with the exception of an energy corporation — that rely on access to electronic information stored ...

August 19, 2019

Attackers are targeting entities from the utility industry with the Adwind Remote Access Trojan (RAT) malware via a malspam campaign that uses URL redirection to malicious payloads. Adwind (also known as jRAT, AlienSpy, JSocket, and Sockrat) is distributed by its developers to threat actors under a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model and it is capable of evading detection by most major anti-malware ...

July 22, 2019

Hackers breached the server of a major contractor working on behalf of the Russian intelligence service before stealing 7.5TB of sensitive data and sharing this freely with other hackers and journalists. Attackers infiltrated the company network of SyTech on 13 July, according to BBC Russia, and began a process of copying data while deleting masses of it. ...

March 4, 2019

Security researchers have finally, with “high confidence,” linked a previously discovered global cyber espionage campaign targeting critical infrastructure around the world to a North Korean APT hacking group. Thanks to the new evidence collected by researchers after analyzing a command-and-control (C2) server involved in the espionage campaign and seized by law enforcement. Dubbed Operation Sharpshooter, the cyber espionage ...

February 22, 2019

Government IT systems and critical infrastructure systems around the world are at risk due to legacy technology and the pending retirement of those who have historically maintained these older systems. Of the U.S. General Services Administration’s mission-critical IT staff, 20-50 percent will be eligible to retire by 2024 and 66 percent of U.K. companies have too few cybersecurity ...

December 13, 2018

Could ambitious endeavour make Ireland the Fort Knox of infosec? IDA Ireland and Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) have joined forces on an initiative to establish Cyber Ireland, a national cybersecurity cluster. Cyber Ireland will provide a collective voice to represent the needs of the cybersecurity sector across the country and will address key challenges including skills needs, ...

September 29, 2018

A mobile conferencing app developed for the UK’s Conservative Party leaked the private details of people who registered to attend party conferences, including the details of party members and UK government officials. The leak was discovered on Saturday afternoon, September 29, by Guardian columnist Dawn Foster who posted her findings on Twitter.  Foster discovered that anyone who ...

July 30, 2018

Despite a looming deadline, over a quarter of federal agencies are still not using basic email security tools. ` As phishing ploys continue to take their toll on businesses, federal agencies have yet to fully protect themselves against such attacks with basic defenses like DMARC. With only months to go before the federal Binding Operational Directive ...

July 25, 2018

Active attack group is eager to make use of available tools, research, and the work of other threat actors. Symantec has uncovered the operations of a threat actor named Leafminer that is targeting a broad list of government organizations and business verticals in various regions in the Middle East since at least early 2017. The group tends ...