Monday, Pellissippi State Community College announced a network outage. On Tuesday, they announced that it was a ransomware attack: Pellissippi State Community College has determined that the network systems outage appears to be the result of a ransomware attack. At this time, the breadth of the incident is under investigation. The College has currently contained the matter and is working to…
Author: Dissent
Canadian Man Charged With Scheme to Commit Cyberattacks Against U.S.
A federal indictment unsealed today in Alaska charges a Canadian national with committing cyberattacks. According to court documents, Matthew Philbert, 31, of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, conspired to and did damage a computer belonging to the State of Alaska in April 2018. In a separate and parallel investigation, the Canadian authorities today also announced cyber charges…
T-Mobile litigation over major data breach to proceed in Missouri
Sara Merken reports the latest update in litigation stemming from the T-Mobile breach disclosed in August that impacted 53 million consumers: The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation has transferred a batch of lawsuits against T-Mobile US Inc over its recently disclosed data breach to a Kansas City, Missouri federal court. The panel in a Friday order centralized…
Microsoft seizes control of websites used by China-backed hackers
Carly Page reports: Microsoft has seized control of a number of websites that were being used by a Chinese government-backed hacking group to target organizations in 29 countries, including the U.S. Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCI) said on Monday that a federal court in Virginia had granted an order allowing the company to take control of the websites…
Cloud Service Provider Compromises Use CeeLoader Malware
Lindsey O’Donnell-Welch reports: A series of campaigns, with links to the threat actor behind the SolarWinds supply-chain intrusion, have been targeting cloud service providers with a new malware loader variant called CeeLoader. Researchers with Mandiant in a Monday analysis said they identified two distinct clusters of activity, UNC3004 and UNC2652, which they associate with UNC2452 (also known…
Maryland health department says there’s no evidence of data lost after cyberattack; website is back online
Christine Condon and Hallie Miller report: The Maryland Department of Health said Monday that there was “no evidence” any of its data had been compromised after a cyberattack forced the agency to take its website offline over the weekend. “There is no evidence at this time that any data have been compromised,” department spokesman Andy…