Petronella Cybersecurity News

Directly on the heels of LockerGoga and MegaCortex, a different strand of ransomware, Maze, which was first discovered nearly a year ago, started to target private companies in the US in November, and the FBI wants to make sure you know about it. Just two days after issuing an alert for LockerGoga and MegaCortex, the […]

Ibrahim Balic, a security researcher, recently exposed a flaw in Twitter’s app that allowed to match unique Twitter user accounts with 17 million phone numbers months ago.  He was able to accomplish this by uploading large lists of phone numbers by way of Twitter’s “Contacts Upload” feature that is available on the social media giant’s […]

It seems like something that only happens in movies and TV shows: It’s Friday the 13th.  You, your colleagues, your entire department, the entire city, in fact, receives the same command to power down their computers immediately and disconnect all devices from the network. But this wasn’t a movie and it wasn’t a TV show… […]

“Eight is Enough” A great, wholesome, family show from the late 70’s and early 80’s.  Also: what Sentara Hospital, with over 300 facilities across the states of North Carolina and Virginia, is telling the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) after being on the receiving end last month of this […]

There is a reason hackers have started targeting hospitals and medical practices.  Not only is their cyber security known to be woefully lacking (despite the best efforts of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [HHS] and HIPAA regulations), but the electric Patient Health Information (ePHI) can literally be life and death.  Meaning?  The […]

Researchers at Trustwave recently discovered a malicious spam campaign.  The email comes as an executable file via email with a tell-tale two sentence subject line that reads “Install Latest Microsoft Windows Update now! Critical Microsoft Windows Update!” There is only one sentence to the actual email itself. Disguised as a .jpg, the file really contains […]

Looters broke into a Durham health clinic sometime after the downtown gas explosion on April 10th that affected over 20 businesses, injured 25 people, and caused the death of two people. The subsequent theft of clinic property has prompted the clinic to notify patients that their information, including diagnoses and treatment information may have been […]

PureLocker, an unusual form of ransomware that attacks enterprise servers, has gone undetected for some time but has recently been revealed by cybersecurity analysts at Intezer and IBM X-Force.  What makes PureLocker so unique is that it’s written in PureBasic programming language.  Malicious software written in PureBasic is difficult for most security systems to detect.  […]

HIPAA Violations have been making headlines recently, and for good reason. Fines for violations can be crippling to companies, and the more mobile our data becomes, the greater the risk for security breech. According to the Health and Human Services website, as of September 30, 2019 the OCR has settled or imposed a civil money […]

Ascension is sharing private healthcare information with Google.  The project, dubbed “Project Nightingale,” was put into play to help Ascension centralize its patient database for the over 2600 hospitals in its healthcare system.  Patient information, including names, test results, and dates of birth are also being collected by Google to help develop a new software […]

Global social media ad spending is projected to grow by as much as 20% this year, bringing it up to the number three slot of largest advertising channels according to Zenith’s Advertizing Expenditure Forecast. Zenith is a media ad agency parented by Publicis Media. $84 billion is slated for global social media spending, exceeding print […]

Researchers at Kaspersky have uncovered a new highly sophisticated, high impact malware threat that breaks encryption:  Reductor.  According to the researchers, the malware “compromises encrypted web communications in an impressive way” and gives the threat actors behind it “capabilities that few other actors in the world have.” Reductor compromises the encrypted HTTPS communication, which enables […]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a warning to U.S. businesses and organizations Wednesday regarding high-impact threats across the country.  Numerous cyberattacks have been documented recently involving ransomware.  Despite the ever-evolving attack strategies, the FBI highlights three main attack techniques that are being used by criminals to avoid detection and infiltrate businesses and organizations: […]

According to Danny Adamitis and Elizabeth Wharton from Prevailion, spear phishing emails have been targeting the U.S. utilizing an obscure file format to beat antiviral software.  They call this campaign “Autumn Aperture”.  Attackers are sending word documents to recipients with content specialized to the victim’s recent activities.  This level of specialization results in a significantly […]

Not one but THREE hospitals in the DCH Health System in Alabama are unable to accept new patients today due to ransomware: DCH Regional Medical Center in Tuscaloosa, Northport Medical Center in Northport, and Fayette Medical Center.  Cybercriminals have demanded an undisclosed amount of money for the unlock code. “A criminal is limiting our ability […]

A security researcher who goes by the Twitter handle “axi0mX” announced on Friday that there is a permanent Bootrom vulnerability “checkm8” in Apple iOS.  The flaw enables bypassing the security protections present in most Apple mobile devices.  Downside: cannot be patched.  Upside: physical access is needed  to exploit it and a system restart erases any […]

Airbus, a European aerospace company, had found itself the victim of several possible Chinese hacker attacks searching for proprietary data and insider secrets. According to sources, AFP spoke to seven security and industry sources, all of whom confirmed a spate of attacks in the past 12 months but asked for anonymity because of the sensitive nature […]

“Advance fee” or “419” scams have been around for years.  The scam works via an attempt to contact the victim so they can be gifted an exuberant amount of funds left unclaimed by a deceased individual who has the same last name as the victim or is their long-lost relative.  Or in the case of […]

The Justice Department is suing Edward Snowden and his publisher MacMillan and Holtzbrinck. Snowden, a former contractor for the CIA and NSA government agencies, released his book Permanent Record today.  The Justice Department says that Snowden failed to “clear” the book with them, and they are now attempting to recover “all proceeds earned by Snowden […]

Microsoft issued security updates yesterday to plug roughly 80 security issues holes in its Windows operating systems and software. Over 25% of those updates are critical.  This is the fourth time this year that Microsoft has had to fix bugs in its Remote Desktop Feature. Two of the bugs resolved in this month’s patch batch […]