attacks

Major tech companies say spyware victims should be able to sue attackers in the US even if the attack physically happens outside the country. They say its particularly important for highly targeted attacks. The companies have put out their position ... by filing an amicus brief in an ongoing case involving Israeli cyber intelligence firm NSO Group, makers of the infamous Pegasus spyware . An amicus brief is where people not directly involved in a case, usually subject matter experts, provide an opinion or information to help the court. The case was brought by a news organization based in El ... (view more)

Microsoft says Russian hackers accessed its customers' emails during an attack earlier this year. It had previously only said Microsoft's own staff were victims. The company has not yet said how many customers are affected but says it has contacted ... them with details of the attack. Microsoft was breached by a group called Midnight Blizzard, believed to operate from Russia. The government there has not commented on the claims. The new revelations follow a Microsoft announcement in January that a small proportion of its corporate email accounts had been accessed by Midnight Blizzard. The attacks ... (view more)

The average ransomware attack now takes less than a day from first breaching a system. It's the first time average attacks can be measured in hours, though ironically it may be a sign of better defenses. The figures comes from researchers at ... Secureworks, who analyze ransomware attacks. They measure dwell time, which is the period between an attacker first gaining access to a system and deploying the ransomware. That's malware which encrypts files, letting the attackers demand a fee to restore access. The average dwell time being under a day is a dramatic development as last year the average ... (view more)

A ransomware gang said to have Russian links appears to have been knocked offline. The REvil group recently demanded a $70 million ransom after a major attack. The group was linked to two recent attacks, the first on an international meat processing ... company. JBS, which is estimated to process 20 percent of the beef and pork sold in the US, had to shut down production while dealing with the breach. An even more serious attack targeted Kaseya, a company that not only offers computing services to businesses, but also powers many managed service providers that run IT for their own clients. The ... (view more)

Most online attacks don't involve malware, according to newly published figures. It's the first time "fileless techniques" have been in the majority. The figures come from an annual report by security company CrowdStrike. It says it analyzed its own ... customer data along with that from investigations into known attackers and data from reported incidents. According to the report, malware-free attacks made up 51 percent of the total during 2019, up from 40 percent the previous year. The tactics were particularly prevalent in North America, making up 74 percent of attacks. (Source: zdnet.com ) As ... (view more)

A man who launched millions of separate attacks on websites has been jailed for 13 months for conspiracy to damage Internet-connected computers. Sergiy Usatyuk, who is 20, offered an attacks-for-hire service using Distributed Denial of Service ... (DDoS) tactics. A Denial Of Service attack is a crude but often effective technique that simply involves flooding a site with bogus "visits" until the web server becomes overloaded, which then causes the website to become inaccessible for ordinary users. It's roughly equivalent to tying up a company's switchboard with prank calls. The "distributed" ... (view more)

Officials in Lake City, Florida have voted to pay half a million dollars to hackers to regain access to computer files. It's the second such payment by a local government in the state in as many weeks. Lake City's government computer system was hit ... by a ransomware attack in which hackers remotely encrypt files and then demand payment to unlock them. They asked for 42 units of the digital cryptocurrency Bitcoin, worth roughly $500,000. That payment method makes it much harder to trace the recipients. The good news in this case is that public safety networks are unaffected and that all ... (view more)

Three Americans have plead guilty to hijacking more than 100,000 internet-connected devices. The group of infected machines (known as a "botnet") was then used to attack websites using a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) to make websites ... unavailable. While most DDoS attacks are carried out on PCs, this attack in particular targeted weaknesses in smaller devices that use the Internet. This included routers, digital video recorders and wireless cameras. That's a significant point, as the tech security community has generally treated security flaws in such devices as a lower ... (view more)

A company that protects websites from online attacks has stopped serving a far right website. But the man who made the decision says he feels uneasy about making such decisions. Cloudflare is designed to protect against denial of service attacks, in ... which people try to bring down a website by flooding it with bogus requests until it's inaccessible to legitimate traffic by real people. It's a tactic often used by hacker groups protesting against the organizations running the site, though it's also been used as a form of cyberwarfare. To combat such attacks, data going to and from ... (view more)

Facebook has announced four changes to its Safety Check feature for dealing with local crises. The changes will offer more detail about what's currently happening, coordinate local help, and help make fundraising easier. Safety Check is a feature ... that lets people in the geographic area of a natural disaster, terror attack or other crisis quickly mark themselves as "safe." The idea is that this saves people exchanging a plethora of messages in order to check if somebody is OK. That's particularly important with voice calls and text messages, which can easily overload local ... (view more)