Month: June 2020

Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered new details of watering hole attacks against the Kurdish community in Syria and Turkey for surveillance and intelligence exfiltration purposes. The advanced persistent threat behind the operation, called StrongPity, has retooled with new tactics to control compromised machines, cybersecurity firm Bitdefender said in a report shared with The Hacker News. “Using
A new standard for cybersecurity in the Internet of Things (IoT) has been unveiled today by the ETSI Technical Committee on Cybersecurity. It establishes a security baseline for internet-connected consumer products and for future IoT certification schemes. It is hoped the standard, titled ETSI EN 303 645, will help prevent large-scale, prevalent attacks taking place against
Poorly secured remote access attracts mostly ransomware gangs, but can provide access to coin miners and backdoors too The COVID-19 pandemic has radically changed the nature of everyday work, forcing employees to do large parts of their jobs via remote access. Cybercriminals – especially ransomware operators – are aware of the shift and attempt to
Since 2015, Secureworks® Counter Threat Unit™ (CTU) researchers have observed a massive increase in the number and impact of post-intrusion ransomware incidents. In these attacks, a threat actor gains access to a compromised network, moves laterally to other systems and networks, locates the critical business assets, and then chooses a time (which could be days
Malware incidents fell by 23% in 2019 despite an overall increase in security events, according to Orange Cyberdefense in its inaugural Security Navigator report. The findings suggest that businesses have grown investment in technologies that protect themselves from these kinds of threats, leading cyber-criminals to shift to other types of attack. Of the security events
Extra Crunch is now live in Romania. That adds to our existing support in Europe in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and U.K.. There’s been reason to be bullish on Romania’s technology sector for some time. A TechCrunch op-ed called the country the “Silicon Valley of Transylvania” in 2016, noting that
Hey everybody, welcome back to Week in Review. Last week, I wrote about Apple’s App Store controversy, which I’m kind of revisiting this week through the lens of how Apple’s WWDC announcements tease a change to what apps fundamentally look like in the future. If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get
GeoVision, a Taiwanese manufacturer of video surveillance systems and IP cameras, recently patched three of the four critical flaws impacting its card and fingerprint scanners that could’ve potentially allowed attackers to intercept network traffic and stage man-in-the-middle attacks. In a report shared exclusively with The Hacker News, enterprise security firm Acronis said it discovered the
A newly detected threat group has stolen an estimated minimum of $200m from cryptocurrency exchanges in just two years. The dastardly deeds of cyber-criminal organization CryptoCore were discovered by security firm ClearSky Cyber Security. Recently published research by the company revealed that the threat group has been active since at least May 2018, primarily targeting victims in the United States
<span class=”featured__span-first-words”>Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes
With Docker gaining popularity as a service to package and deploy software applications, malicious actors are taking advantage of the opportunity to target exposed API endpoints and craft malware-infested images to facilitate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and mine cryptocurrencies. According to a report published by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 threat intelligence team, the purpose
A despicable Brit has been jailed after stealing from America’s elderly to fund his extravagant millionaire lifestyle.  Fraudster Gareth David Long was sentenced to 70 months in prison for running an elaborate scheme that claimed more 375,000 victims during a six-month period in 2013.  Las Vegas resident Long operated a third-party processing company V Internet Corp from
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is leaving Initialized Capital, the investment firm he co-founded in 2011 with Garry Tan, as first reported by Axios and confirmed by TechCrunch. The move comes weeks after Ohanian publicly stepped down from the Reddit board of directors, with Y Combinator president Michael Seibel taking his spot. Ohanian launched Initialized Capital
With the game industry booming, more entrepreneurs are evaluating where to base their new startup or open a new office for their existing company. The U.S. government’s block on H1-B and L-1 visas will encourage American game startups to add an office abroad much sooner than they otherwise would have. But where? This spring, I
The following analysis was compiled and published to Threat Intelligence clients in November 2018. The Secureworks® Counter Threat Unit™ (CTU) research team is publicly sharing insights about BRONZE VINEWOOD and its use of the HanaLoader malware and DropboxAES RAT, to increase visibility of the threat group’s activities. In mid-2018, Secureworks® Counter Threat Unit™ (CTU) researchers identified
The United States Department of Justice yesterday sentenced a 22-year-old Washington-based hacker to 13 months in federal prison for his role in creating botnet malware, infecting a large number of systems with it, and then abusing those systems to carry out large scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against various online service and targets. According to
US lawmakers have introduced a bill that proposes banning federal law enforcement agencies from using facial recognition and biometric surveillance technology. The Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act of 2020 was introduced yesterday by Senators Ed Markey and Jeff Merkley.  If passed into law, the wide-sweeping bill would make federal funding for state and local law