Petronella Cybersecurity News

The good news: cyberattacks on healthcare organizations have dropped. The bad news: cybercriminals have a new target. The information comes from figures released from IBM’s X-Force Thread Intelligence Index, which shows that healthcare cyberattacks peaked in 2015. It’s still a major target, but as larger organizations are increasing their security, attacks have turned to smaller […]

Cerber is one of the more popular variations of ransomware. A new version has been detected, and it has a few new tricks up its sleeve. The latest version of Cerber extracts itself from a hacker-owned Dropbox account. The self-extraction makes it look safe to machine-learning tools, which is one way it avoids detection. It also checks […]

WikiLeaks’ DarkMatter dump brought some interesting revelations to light, most notably was the fact that the CIA has been working with Apple since 2008, a mere year after its release, to hack the iPhone. One such example of this is the malware entitled “NightSkies,” a virus that would allow the hacker to have full control […]

Have you ever gotten a popup window while using Safari on your iPhone or iPad, telling you that you have to pay a fee to regain access to your browser? Leaving aside any judgment on the kinds of websites or online activities you that are usually involved that result in getting it, if you’ve seen […]

There’s a cybersecurity storm hammering your roof, will you find and fix the leaks in your network before they cause major damage? If you’re a homeowner, then you know that leaks are inevitable. No matter what you do your roof is going to have some soft spots due to simple wear and tear. If there’s […]

Hospital datacenters could go the way of rotary phones and VCRs in the very near future, as brick and mortar make way for the cheaper and more convenient cloud. John Halamka, MD, CIO of Count Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center predicts that the centers could become obsolete within the next five years, stating that the […]

iPhone thieves may be able to pick up an iPhone, but thanks to “Find my iPhone,” breaking into them is such a headache.   However, where there is a will, there is a way. A scam was recently discovered: one that involves stealing the victim’s Apple iCloud username and password after the theft of the […]

Google algorithms helped identify the source of a massive credit card breach – for the second time in just nine months, with its big “This site may be hacked” warning. And oddly enough, the source of both breaches?  Restaurants chains. Restaurants use Point of Sale (POS) terminals in their businesses to help track items such […]

You think only “regular” citizens can fall victim to tax phishing scams?  Think again. Last Thursday, George McKenzie, the CEO of VA-based cybersecurity firm Defense Point Security, LLC, informed its employees that all of their W-2 information was compromised after a fellow co-worker was ensnared in a hacker’s phishing “net.”  This data included such personal […]

A perpetrator, whose identity is still unknown (despite being caught on surveillance tapes), nabbed a Secret Service agent’s agency-issued laptop from the agent’s vehicle on Thursday in New York City, as well as an official Secret Service lapel pin.   While the laptop itself did not contain sensitive information, if the thief also happens to […]

A hacker group called the Turkish Crime Family is demanding $75,000 in cyrptocurrency or $100,000 in iTunes gift cards from Apple.  They claim to have access to 300 million iCloud accounts and say they’ll wipe all those accounts clean if Apple doesn’t pony up. A screenshot of a conversation between the hacker group and the […]

One click.  One and a half billion users.  Five hundred million dollars.  Those are roughly the numbers involved in sordid story of Yahoo’s sale to Verizon. As you probably already know, Verizon has been working on buying Yahoo, but a hacking scandal that compromised a mindblowing number of user accounts allowed Verizon to get a […]

Tax season is upon us, but procrastinators and tax consultants aren’t the only people who are busy this time of year.  More and more, this is a busy season for criminals who want to cash in on your tax return. An increasingly popular technique is to spoof a CEO’s email to steal a company’s employee’s […]

Let’s face it, state-sponsored hackers are scary. They have the knowledge and resources wreak havoc on governments and individual citizens alike. Take the Dyn DDoS hack that happened last fall. Dyn is an internet performance management company that provides internet infrastructure, so when they were hit by a large DDoS attack that shut down their […]

The theft of half a billion Yahoo user accounts has been well-documented.  Not only has it affected users, it’s also caused problems with Yahoo’s attempted buyout to Verizon.  Some scoffed when Yahoo mentioned being hacked by state-sponsored hackers, but now it appears there’s some validity to that claim.  The US Justice Department revealed an indictment […]

Who: WikiLeaks is a self-proclaimed “stateless news organization” that is led by Julian Assange.  The website became infamous in June 2013 when Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor, leaked secret NSA surveillance documents proving that the government agency does in fact illegally monitor its citizens. It is believed that the person who leaked the CIA files […]

On Tuesday, February 28, 2017, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Simple Storage System (S3) – a service used by hundreds of thousands of websites – went down and stayed down for most of the day.   Unfortunately, the outage impacted millions of people, including Nest “smart” thermostat users, who were unable to manage or receive alerts […]

Poor Yahoo.  Once an internet giant, there is an ongoing attempt to sell it off to Verizon, but the search engine and news outlet continues to get dinged by reports of massive data theft from various hacks. Verizon is still interested in the purchase, but according to a SEC filing, they are looking to get […]

Russia is suspected of having interfered in the recent presidential election in the United States.  Russia is also suspected of influencing politics in France and Germany.  The UK recently sent a warning to its own political parties warning of potential Russian interference. Ciaran Martin is the chief executive of the Government Communications HeadquartersCyber Security Centre […]

There was an American soldier fighting in WWII. He busted the heel of one of his boots so he took them to the Army shoe repair and dropped them off. But soldiers tend to be busy people, so he forgot to pick them up. 4 years later, he was cleaning out his closet and found […]