Cyber Security

On Wednesday, Yahoo announced that personal information from one billion user accounts, including names, addresses, passwords, phone numbers, birthdates, and security questions, was stolen. By noon Thursday, Yahoo’s stock had fallen 5% and Verizon’s $4.8 billion purchase of the company appears to be in jeopardy. Right now, it seems Verizon executives and general counsel are […]

Yahoo dropped a bomb on its users and stockholders on Wednesday: More than one billion users’ accounts have been stolen in an attack that took place in August of 2013. One billion accounts compromised would mean that this breach far surpasses Myspace’s 360 million accounts and 427 million passwords stolen, making it the largest hack […]

Microsoft will be ending or scaling back support for dozens of products starting in 2017.  The list of products includes versions of Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.  Here’s a full list: Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 2 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Service Pack 1 Microsoft Excel for Mac 2011 Microsoft Lync for Mac 2011 […]

The great irony of the 2016 US presidential election is that after all the talk from Donald Trump of it being rigged, when it was all said and done, it’s the Democrats who end up feeling like the election was stolen. Now it seems that behind the scenes the Obama administration wrestled with how to […]

Quest Diagnostics, a forensic clinical lab company, announced earlier this week that they had suffered a cyberattack through their internet app. According to Quest, hackers were able to access the data of 34,000 people through their MyQuest by Care360 app a couple weeks ago.  Accessed data includes names, birth dates and phone numbers in addition to lab […]

Do you remember a few months ago when a bunch of major websites went down to a DDoS attack?  It was done with a botnet called Mirai, and it’s still around. Mirai is a kind of malware that finds and co-opts devices to use as its programmer desires.  This group of devices is called a […]

Locky, a popular strain of ransomware, has used the names of Norse gods like Odin and Thor as their file extensions up to now.  They’ve switched to Egyptian gods with the new .osiris extension.  What else is going on with Locky these days? Osiris is mostly being spread with a phishing technique where an Excel file is […]

Have you heard of the New World Hackers?  They group claims to have dozens of members from all over, but it’s actually just a core of three people, the youngest and most technical of which is a teenager. The group specializes in DDoS attacks, the most high profile of which knocked the BBC’s website offline for […]

South Korea’s Military Cyber Command, a group set up to protect South Korea against hacking, has been hacked, presumably by North Korea. North Korea had previously been accused of hacking South Korean banks and other institutions, but this is the first time the South Korean military has been a target. Military documents, including confidential information, was […]

A ransomware attack caused three hospitals to cancel operations, impacting almost 3,000 patients from October 30 through November 2. The ransomware used was a strain called Globe2 and hit the Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust.  A spokesperson for the Trust said that their team took action as soon as the infection was detected, which […]

The general consensus up to this point has been that when hackers commit a Distributed Denial of Service  (DDoS) attack, they were taking down networks and system as a way to get attention. It turns out that is actually true, but not for the reasons people originally thought. Apparently, while a business is busy handling […]

At least six different Saudi Government agencies, including the General Authority of Civil Aviation, has had thousands of their systems crippled in an attack by hackers using the Shamoon virus. With Iran as the most like source of the attack, Shamoon wipes the hard drives of machines it infects. This latest attack is similar to […]

The Obama administration is under pressure from members of the Democratic Party to state in clearer terms that Russia’s ultimate goal in interfering with the US election was to help Donald Trump become president. According to new information, the intelligence community is becoming more and more sure that this is the case, but unable to […]

Cyber Monday has become one of the biggest shopping days of the year with this year’s sales topping expectations by reaching a record $3.39 billion. More than 85% of online shoppers do at least some of their buying on a smartphone and consequently, thieves are exploiting those devices to steal people’s personal information. One way […]

A recently discovered vulnerability in Firefox and Tor browsers that de-anonymizes users has been fixed in a newly published patch by Mozilla. While the bug appears to only be actively exploited on Windows based systems, anyone running OS X or Linux should immediately patch their systems, because it can affect them as well. Mozilla was […]

A newly discovered exploit has the possibility to open up Linux users running Fedora and possibly other Linux versions to backdoors, key loggers and other drive-by types of malware by attacking a vulnerability in GStreamer decoder for the FLIC file format. Chris Evans, the security researcher behind the exploit, was able to go after the […]

The MailChimp email newsletter service was recently attacked by hackers who infiltrated their subscriber database and sent out emails containing malicious links to users. The emails appeared to be from companies that used MailChimp to outsource their newsletter distribution. The phony emails originate from an administrator account, alleging to be invoices utilizing Quickbooks. Clicking the […]

For the most part, experts agree that the cost of maintaining a cyber warfare operation will go down as time goes on. Where they begin to disagree is in whether these costs will drop to a degree that would allow non-state actors like ISIS to get in on the act. With that said there are […]

It appears that the personal data of at least 130,000 US Navy Sailors has been accessed by an unknown hacker. The data accessed includes the Social Security numbers of 134,386 both former and active-duty US sailors. On October 27, Hewlett-Packard notified the Navy that a laptop used by one of their employees working under a […]

Riders using San Francisco’s Municipal Railway (MUNI) got an unexpected Thanksgiving gift on Black Friday, when they discovered “Out of Service” and “Metro Free” signs posted on ticket machines that afternoon and Saturday. It appears that MUNI’s computerized fare system was the victim of a ransomware attack that ultimately forced it to shut down. Like most ransomware, […]