Matthew Connaster reports: CDK Global reportedly paid a $25 million ransom in Bitcoin after its servers were knocked offline by crippling ransomware. Last week, CDK restored services to car dealerships across the US after a two-week outage caused by a “cyber incident” that looked a lot like a ransomware infection. The shutdown of CDK’s software platform caused…
Category: Malware
Microsoft links Scattered Spider hackers to Qilin and RansomHub ransomware attacks
Sergiu Gatlan reports: Microsoft says the Scattered Spider cybercrime gang has added Qilin ransomware to its arsenal and is now using it in attacks. “In the second quarter of 2024, financially motivated threat actor Octo Tempest, our most closely tracked ransomware threat actor, added RansomHub and Qilin to its ransomware payloads in campaigns,” Microsoft said Monday. After…
Indonesia says it has begun recovering data after major ransomware attack
The Straits Times reports: Indonesia said it is beginning to recover data that had been encrypted in a major ransomware attack in June which affected more than 160 government agencies. The attackers, identified as Brain Cipher, asked for US$8 million (S$10.7 million) in ransom to unlock the data, before they later apologised and released the decryption key…
Notorious Hacker Kingpin ‘Tank’ Is Finally Going to Prison
Matt Burgess reports: For more than a decade, Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov—a Ukrainian who used the online hacker name “Tank”—managed to evade cops. When FBI and Ukrainian officials raided his Donetsk apartment in 2010, the place was deserted and Penchukov had vanished. But the criminal spree came to a juddering halt at the end of 2022,…
CloudSorcerer hackers abuse cloud services to steal Russian govt data
Bill Toulas reports: A new advanced persistent threat (APT) group named CloudSorcerer abuses public cloud services to steal data from Russian government organizations in cyberespionage attacks. Kaspersky security researchers discovered the cyberespionage group in May 2024. They report that CloudSorcerer uses custom malware that uses legitimate cloud services for command and control (C2) operations and data storage….
Cyber Attack May Have Exposed Alabama Student, Teacher Data
Rebecca Griesbach reports: The Alabama State Department of Education experienced a data breach in June that may have compromised some student and employee data, officials announced Wednesday. On June 17, information system staff interrupted and stopped an attack on the department’s computer system before hackers could fully access the system or lock it, according to…