Petronella Cybersecurity News

You PC just froze.  An official-looking message that appears to be from Microsoft pops up and tells you to call a support number.  If this scene is familiar to you, you’ve been witness to a scam. A compromised ad injects malicious code that hogs up all of your CPU, making it impossible (or painfully slow, if you’re […]

A hospital in the United Kingdom was forced to divert trauma patients and cancel planned operations on Wednesday after a cyberattack left their systems crippled. The National Health Service’s Lincolnshire and Goole (NHS) trust posted a major incident alert on its website indicating they were forced to shut down after a virus infected their systems on October […]

As we get more and more accustomed to the convenience of our everyday objects having network capabilities in the Internet of Things so that we can control our lights, thermostats, baby monitors and countless other things from our phones, we sometimes forget the security risks that are associated with it. Unfortunately a security flaw was […]

According to a recent study conducted by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and the Association for Executives in Healthcare Information Security (AEHIS) the top security concern IT executives in the healthcare industry are ransomware and malware attacks. Additionally the survey pointed to social engineering, internal threats, and data theft as the top […]

A recent study of over 10,000 email servers has found that 82% were misconfigured. Servers that allow malicious emails that appear to come from within an organization or business to pass through leaves them open to various types of attacks. Known as email spoofing, this type of attack typically starts with an email that appears […]

Over the past week over 14 million emails have been sent out in a new campaign with the purpose of spread the Locky strain of ransomware. As we’ve reported many times, once Locky takes control it then encrypts a victim’s files and demands payment in Bitcoins to get a key to unlock them, typically around […]

You probably heard about the massive DDoS attack that took out swaths of the internet this weekend.  It happened because hackers were able to hijack unsecured surveillance systems and routers from around the world and put them to use overloading websites.  If you have any internet-enabled devices, they could be used in some nefarious hacker […]

As we all know, WikiLeaks has been publishing embarrassing emails from the inner circle of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, with the most recent coming from the personal email of John Podesta. The US government and security firms all believe it was the work of hackers acting on the orders of the Russian government, but the […]

Yahoo released their earnings statement on Tuesday, but took the unusual step of skipping out on a conference call to discuss the earnings. The way it usually works is that a company will release their earnings statement than get on a call with analysts, investors, reporters and various other interested parties for a Q&A session. […]

Recently there has been some particular insight and knowledge given to the fact that there are more that 5,761 online stores that are currently affected with card data stealing malware. In particular the number of online shops that are infected with malware has skyrocketed in the past year according to William de Groot in particular […]

Since the Chernobyl incident, everyone has known the dangers of a malfunctioning nuclear power plant.  With the rise of cyberattacks, experts have warned whoever would listen about potential vulnerabilities with nuke plants.  It turns out that such worries were well founded. The International Atomic Energy Agency announced that a nuclear power plant has already been […]

Everyone knows the law of supply and demand: when a resource is scarce, the price is high.  When the market is glutted, the price falls.  The internet black market is no different. It appears that cybercriminals have flooded the market with Electronic Health Records (EHR) and have forced their value down to the degree that […]

Whenever there’s a big data dump, the security experts at Aetna jump on it and use analytics to scan and identify any credentials that are the same as those of a current user. A match means there’s an opportunity for hackers to take advantage of those credentials. The team immediately forces a password reset and […]

It appears that Verizon is looking to get at least a $1 billion discount on its acquisition of Yahoo. Originally they were hoping to buy the company and merge it with AOL to compete with Google and Facebook, but the recent revelations involving hacking and spying have Verizon wary. Two week ago Yahoo admitted that […]

Unfortunately for Mac users that believe their computers to be safer than one running Windows there a new piece of malware that is adding to the mounting evidence that that is no longer true. This particular program allows hackers to monitor and record video or audio using the built in camera and microphone without the […]

A Romanian man has been arrested in that country by City of London Police working on the London Regional Fraud Team. The man, Emanual Leahu, has been charged for his participation in a campaign involving ATM malware. Authorities believe Leahu to be part of a European hacking gang. The thieves broke into ATMs and installed […]

According to reports, Yahoo developed software in order to scan the emails of hundreds of millions of its users on behalf of US intelligence services. Additionally, installing this software appears to be the result of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court order. The program was originally designed to scan for child pornography and emails […]

Turkey’s reputation is less than sterling when it comes to censorship.  Their latest foray into censorship targets cloud storage services and information hosting services including Dropbox, GitHub, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. Most of the affected sites were returning SSL errors, which points to traffic being intercepted one some macro level, such as the national level. […]

Last week, the United States formally accused Russia for cyberattacks involving the Democratic Party.  It looks like the hack was actually much deeper than that, involving Republicans as well, and targeting people whose work the Russian government considers strategically important, and it’s been going on for longer than initially suspected. The hacking appears to mostly […]

The US government has formally accused Russia of recent cyberattacks.  The Obama administration claims confidence that the Russian government was behind the attacks that targeted the Democratic Party, which may have been an attempt to interfere in the upcoming presidential election.  Russia has denied the claims. The statement was released by the Department of Homeland […]