Petronella Cybersecurity News

Aaaah, tax season is upon us:  Headaches, Deadlines and Cybercriminals, oh my! Fraudulent tax filing has become one of the most common forms of cybercrime over the last decade,  and it does not appear to be getting much better.   You may wonder how this information attained by the hackers. Sometimes it is phished directly […]

16,000 homes and businesses are set to learn about our book, How HIPAA Can Crush Your Medical Practice, in the pages of the magazine Suburban Living.  Make sure to grab a copy, especially if you work in the medical field!

Two instances of CEO fraud were announced yesterday.  One victim was a county in Kansas; the other a hospital. In the first instance, George S. James of Brookhaven, Georgia passed himself off as the CEO of a company requesting payments totaling $566,000 from Sedgwick County, Kansas.  The payment was made, but the county later found out […]

By now, people are becoming more familiar with the term IoT, or the Internet of Things, where everything from cars to refrigerators to light bulbs are connected to the Internet.  Just a few months ago, hackers took over IoT devices to perform DDoS attacks against large websites and services.  What does that mean for the future of […]

The Washington Post published a document that appears to be a draft of an executive order from President Donald Trump this past Friday.  The goal of the EC is to review the nation’s cybersecurity. The report, which can be read in full here, assigns a team to be led by the Secretary of Defense with […]

The phone rings.  The number isn’t familiar, but the area code is, so you decide to answer the call. You answer: “Hello?” “Can you hear me?” the voice on the other end of the line asks, loud and clear. Don’t answer, because if you do, you could be authorizing charges to your credit card or […]

A new Trojan allows hackers to hide their IP addresses, allowing them to carry out whatever nefarious online deeds they like, by turning Linux machines into proxy servers. Linux.Proxy.10, the name of the Trojan, was discovered in December by cybersecurity firm Doctor Web.  They have since found thousands of infected machines, but they expect to find […]

We wrote a post about a form of ransomware called ‘Popcorn Time’ that delivered the encryption key to the original victim if they spread it to two other people. The hackers behind popcorn time explained through the ransomware that they were collecting ransoms because they were Syrian refugees who had lost everything in the Syrian […]

Malware slipping through to become available on Google Play, Android’s marketplace, is nothing new.  Now, however, a ransomware has snuck through, and it threatens to do a lot of damage. Named Charger, the ransomware took great pains to avoid detection.  It comes packaged in an app called EnergyRescue and employs a lot of features to […]

“Change your WiFi password and show guests where your loyalty lies! #ThatsMyTeam.”  That was a message from Charter Spectrum’s Twitter account, @GetSpectrum.  Do you see any problem there? Charter is one of the largest TV and internet providers in the country.  Having a message about something topical, like the upcoming Super Bowl, is fine.  Reminding […]

Do you remember the Heartbleed vulnerability?  It’s been known about for almost three years now, yet there are still nearly 200,000 systems that are vulnerable to it.  Is yours one of them? Heartbleed is a zero day vulnerability found in OpenSSL that allows hackers to read parts of a server’s memory, which can lead to […]

There’s a new phishing scam going around aimed at stealing your Gmail password.  The scary thing is that even computer security pros are falling for it. Gmail is by far the most popular service for email, clocking in at over a billion active monthly users.  Gmail is popular for a number of reasons, not least […]

Imagine you won a Programmer of the Year Award in high school.  You get into James Madison University.  You get an internship with a government security contractor.  You create a bit of software and make about $100,000 of it.  And then, at 21 years old, you’re facing a ten-year prison sentence. That’s the biography of one […]

Eleven gigabytes of health data from SOCOM, the US Special Operations Command, was exposed and ripe for hacker pickings.  The vulnerability had to do with an unprotected remote syncing service, stemming from an improperly configured backup by Potomac Healthcare, a military subcontractor. The security breach was discovered by Chris Vickery, a white hat hacker who […]

How many times have you seen a TV show or movie where a couple of tough guys in leather jackets, maybe carrying baseball bats, walk into a diner or mom and pop shop and demand money?  When the owner refuses, they start smashing stuff, and when they’re done they demand protection money to make sure […]

Less than a month ago, a major city lost power for a little more than an hour just after midnight, affecting over 200,000 people.  A cybersecurity firm claims it was very similar to an incident from a year before, and that Russia is very likely behind it. The attack occurred on December 17 of last year […]

You may recall the tiff between Apple and the FBI following the shooting that took place on December 2, 2015 in San Bernardino, California that left 14 people dead and 22 wounded.  The FBI wanted Apple’s help in unlocking the iPhone of Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the shooters, to see what information they could glean […]

One way investigators have of identifying the source of computer hacks is by looking at the code.  Last week, malware code connected to cyberattacks the US says were perpetrated by Russia was found in a laptop at an electric company in Vermont. The code was discovered after the Burlington Electric Department received an alert sent out by the […]

The number of physicians who will see their Medicare payments reduced by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will fall in 2017; however, the amount of the adjustment for those who do qualify (because they do not meet the “Meaningful Use” guidelines) will be increasing from the current penalty of 2% to 3%. […]

On November 7 of this year, Community Health Plan of Washington (CHPW), a nonprofit Medicaid-based health insurance company in Seattle, received a disturbing voicemail, the effects of which are just today being fully realized. The unidentified caller stated that the firm (a subsidiary of NTT Data) who provides technical services to CHPW had a major […]