Petronella Cybersecurity News

Google’s Project Zero team has one main goal: to find software vulnerabilities before the black hatters do, and they are very good at their job.  Once a vulnerability is found, the team then gives the company 90 days to patch the vulnerability before releasing it to the public. On June 9, 2016, Project Zero member […]

The DNC is not the only political party with computer security issues. An official Trump campaign fundraising website, secure2.donaldjtrump.com, was hacked just in time for Presidents’ Day by hackers known only as “Pro_Mast3r” who are apparently based out of Iraq.  The website was “defaced” by the unknown hackers, who displayed a shadowy figure in a […]

An analysis over more than a billion emails yielded some interesting stats when comparing work email versus personal email. The numbers, compiled and reported by Google Research, show that work email is much more prone to hacking attempts, which makes sense.  A compromised work email account can yield a lot more money than a personal […]

No matter what you do, when you fight hackers you’re at a disadvantage. Do your backups, setup network infrastructure, even get cybercrime insurance. No matter what you do you will be at a disadvantage once you’re attacked because hackers not only have the element of surprise but they also don’t have to deal with the […]

Poor Yahoo.  They were already involved in a data breach that compromised over a billion user accounts.  Now there’s been another, new hack that they kinda sorta quietly let people know about two months ago. The latest attack was disclosed in a statement Yahoo released in December, but it was mostly overlooked because it was […]

How was your Christmas? Get anything good? This may not surprise you, but Amazon had a pretty good Christmas this year. According to an Amazon press release, they sold 9x more echo devices than last year and millions of Alexa devices. That means millions of households just connected to the internet with personal assistant devices, […]

Cybercrime and death have more in common than you think. No one has died from being hacked yet, but if you keep reading you’ll see why you should fear hackers the same way you fear dying. The Reczone password manager seems like a perfect way to keep your login credentials safe. It is an air-gapped […]

A hacker group has been using brute force attacks to gain access to small business networks, mostly in Australia and New Zealand, to spread Crysis ransomware since September.  The number of attacks doubled in January and spread to larger businesses in more countries, particularly American healthcare organizations. The hackers gain access to networks through RPD […]

Don’t let even a little HIPAA slip go unnoticed.  Presence Health of Chicago was recently fined nearly half a million dollars for failing to alert patients about some missing information. The incident goes back to a paper operating room schedule that went missing in 2013.  The schedule had the names, birthdates and other health information […]

Though it started out as a simple blogging platform, WordPress has grown to become one of the most popular content management system used in building all kinds of websites, powering over 74.6 million sites.  Recently, however, nearly two million sites have been hacked. The attack, which replaces the content of the website with a message […]

With Windows-based PCs being much more widely used, hackers have focused their efforts on them much more than they have on Apple Mac computers.  That, however, is starting to change. One example of this is that Word macro malware has recently been discovered on Macs.  If you’re not familiar with what that is, a macro is […]

Fileless malware, which doesn’t need to copy files or folders to a hard drive to be executed, was first detected in 2014, it hasn’t hit the mainstream until now.  And hit it has, having infected more than 140 financial institutions across the world. Fileless malware is injected into and run from the RAM of processes […]

Last week we reported about two cases of CEO fraud, where an employee sent sensitive information to a data thief posing as someone high up in a company.  Now we’ve got two more. The victims were Campbell County Health in Wyoming and eHealthInsurance.  In both cases, a thief was able to pass themselves off as […]

If you’re looking to get free access to Netflix and come across an app that claims to have leaked Netflix accounts for you to use, don’t fall to the temptation to download it.  It’s actually ransomware. The program is called the Netflix Login Generator and purports to let you use other people’s Netflix login credentials […]

A police department was recently hit with ransomware.  When they decided not to pay the ransom, eight years worth of evidence was lost. A statement released last week by the Cockrell Hill Police Department (a suburb of Dallas, TX) said that the number of affected cases should be pretty small, saying that a lot of […]

Licking County, Ohio took a licking recently.  (Sorry, I couldn’t help it.)  The county’s offices, including the police, were almost totally shut down due to a ransomware infection. There’s been no disclosure as of yet as to exactly how it happened, but ransomware infections are usually caused by someone opening an attachment in an email.  Sometimes […]

Are you and your cybergeek significant other looking for a movie or show to watch this weekend?  Or maybe you just want to enjoy some good reading that will both inform and entertain.  Either way, here’s a list for you to check out. Dragnet Nation Author: Julia Angwin Medium: Non-fiction Summary: Angwin writes about her […]

What are the most pressing cyber issues facing us today?  What questions need answering in order to come up with a sensible solution? Corporate Complicity The Issue: While most of us rely on large companies such as Google, Apple, etc., to protect our accounts and information. Question Raised: How can we be sure that these […]

You know that annoying little kid who hits a growth spurt and then seemingly overnight transforms from a nuisance into a menacing bully? That bully is ransomware, the growth spurt was 2016, and it doesn’t appear that 2017 will be any easier. Ransomware was not kind as a child; in the beginning, the strategy involved […]

Think you are up-to-date on your Cyberknowledge? Take this quiz to find out! Noteworthy Cyberactivists ___ 1. This key player is the director of cybersecurity for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and has researched malware and coordinated security training initiatives. ___ 2. An outspoken digital security and privacy buff, this person gained notoriety after leaking NSA […]