Month: May 2020

The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) is to create and lead a new federal digital research institute that will devise ways to shield America’s manufacturers from cyber-threats.  In addition to assisting US industry in blocking cyber-attacks, the Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CyManII) will explore how to help manufacturers achieve energy efficiency.  Other areas
Apple recently paid Indian vulnerability researcher Bhavuk Jain a huge $100,000 bug bounty for reporting a highly critical vulnerability affecting its ‘Sign in with Apple‘ system. The now-patched vulnerability could have allowed remote attackers to bypass authentication and take over targeted users’ accounts on third-party services and apps that have been registered using ‘Sign in
The 40-year-old one-time CEO of a Utah tech company is serving a custodial sentence after downloading over 13,000 images of child sexual abuse, bestiality, and rape.  Douglas Eugene Saltsman was sentenced yesterday to 210 days in prison and 48 months of probation by Utah 3rd District Judge Douglas Hogan after being convicted on three felony charges of
Microsoft has warned of a new type of data stealing Java-based ransomware, dubbed PonyFinal. PonyFinal is what Microsoft describes as “human-operated ransomware” — to distinguish it from commoditized variants that are distributed in an automated way by hackers. The tech giant’s Security Intelligence group revealed in a series of tweets this week that the first
by Paul Ducklin If you’re a Naked Security Podcast listener, you’ll have heard Sophos’s own Peter Mackenzie telling some fairly wild ransomware stories. Peter works in the Managed Threat Response (MTR) part of our business – in his own words, if your network’s on fire, he’s one of the people who will rush in to
Ransomware operators had another standout year in 2019, with attacks and ransom demands soaring according to new data from Group-IB. The Singapore-based security vendor claimed that, after a relatively quiet 2018, ransomware was back with a vengeance last year, as attack volumes climbed by 40%. As large enterprises became an increasing focus for attacks, ransom
In a closely-watched decision today, the Supreme Court of British Columbia published a key decision in the extradition case of Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei Technologies, China’s largest telecommunications company and a frequent target of U.S. policymakers. In its ruling, the court said that the case met the standard for “double criminality,” and thus
Donald Trump has decided to pick a fight with Twitter after one of his posts on the upcoming election was labelled misleading by the social media platform. The original tweet claimed that Mail-In (postal) ballots during the November Presidential election would be “substantially fraudulent.” The issue has become a partisan one of late, as Democrats
by Paul Ducklin Apple’s latest iOS versions have only been out for a week. The updates are new enough that Apple’s own Security updates page still lists [2020-05-26T14:00Z] the security holes that were fixed in iOS 13.5 and iOS 12.4.7 as “details available soon”. But there’s a jailbreak available already for iOS 13.5, released by