David McAfee reports: Facebook Inc. will pay $6.5 million to class counsel in a lawsuit that alleged the company’s negligence allowed hackers to obtain user information via software bugs, ending a dispute over attorneys’ fees. The parties reached an agreement prior to a hearing scheduled for Thursday, they told Judge William Alsup. The amount is described…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Arrested Clop gang members laundered over $500M in ransomware payments
Catalin Cimpanu reports: The members of the Clop ransomware gang that were arrested last week in Ukraine as part of an international law enforcement action also operated money laundering services for multiple cybercrime groups. According to cryptocurrency exchange portal Binance, the group engaged in both cyber-attacks and “a high-risk exchanger” that laundered funds for the Clop ransomware…
Data breaches: Most victims unaware when shown evidence of multiple compromised accounts
The implications of this research report are somewhat disheartening — but also important. If even with media coverage, notification laws, and HaveIBeenPwned, people STILL don’t know that their info has been caught up in multiple breaches, we need to do more educating. It’s been nine years since the LinkedIn data breach, eight years since Adobe…
LV Ransomware Group Repurposed REvil Binary, Researchers Find
Dennis Fisher reports: Researchers have discovered that the LV ransomware that has been in use since late 2020 is actually a modified version of the REvil ransomware binary that is being distributed by a separate threat group. An analysis of the LV ransomware binary by Secureworks Counter Threat Unit researchers shows that LV is a version of…
Norway says Chinese group APT31 is behind catastrophic 2018 government hack
Catalin Cimpanu reports: Norway’s police secret service said this week that APT31, a cyber-espionage group operating on behalf of China, was responsible for a 2018 breach of the government’s IT network. According to the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST), the 2018 hack was as bad as it could get. “The investigation revealed that the actor…
50,000 security disasters waiting to happen: The problem of America’s water supplies
Kevin Collier reports: On Jan. 15, a hacker tried to poison a water treatment plant that served parts of the San Francisco Bay Area. It didn’t seem hard. The hacker had the username and password for a former employee’s TeamViewer account, a popular program that lets users remotely control their computers, according to a private report…