AUSTIN, Texas– A Ukrainian national pleaded guilty in federal court in Austin today to one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. According to court documents, Mark Sokolovsky, 28, conspired to operate the Raccoon Infostealer as a malware-as-a-service or “MaaS.” Individuals who deployed Raccoon Infostealer to steal data from victims leased access to the malware…
Author: Dissent
Russian hackers attack websites of Belgian institutions
Eli Stoanova reports: Russian hackers have attacked the websites of the Senate of the Federal Parliament of Belgium, as well as the electronic pages of the local authority in the southern Belgian region of Wallonia, the administration of the Wallonia-Brussels region and the municipality of Antwerp, local media reported, as quoted by BTA. It is…
Russian state media company hit by unprecedented cyberattack, Kremlin says
Thomson Reuters reports: Russian state media company VGTRK has been targeted in an unprecedented cyberattack, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday, saying that specialists were working hard to determine who was responsible. VGTRK, which owns and operates Russia’s main national TV channels and a slew of regional channels and radio stations, said earlier on…
Malware attack on State Data Center in India puts some citizen services at a standstill
CSO reports: India’s hill state of Uttarakhand’s entire IT infrastructure came to a standstill on Friday after malware was detected on systems at the State Data Center. The shutdown impacted several critical services, including government websites, the Chief Minister’s helpline, and land registration services. Officials, suspecting a cyberattack, launched an investigation into the breach, while…
Academic paper suggests governments should attack public blockchains
Vince Quill reports: An academic paper titled: “Reconciliation of Anti-Money Laundering Instruments and European Data Protection Requirements in Permissionless Blockchain Spaces” published in the Journal of Cybersecurity suggests that governments should target cryptocurrencies — especially privacy preserving chains — to combat money laundering. The author of the paper outlined several methods of undermining trust in permissionless blockchains including 51%…
MoneyGram: No evidence ransomware is behind recent cyberattack
Lawrence Abrams reports: Payment platform MoneyGram says there is no evidence that ransomware is behind a recent cyberattack that led to a five-day outage in September. MoneyGram is an American payment and money transfer platform that allows people to send and receive money through an extensive network of 350,000 physical locations in 200 countries or via…