Jeff Francis reports that Maastricht University in the Netherlands paid a Bitcoin ransom of US$220,000 to hackers who infected the university’s system with malware on December 24 after an employee fell for a phishing attack the previous month: The hackers, later identified as TA505, a Russian criminal gang, demanded a ransom of 30 bitcoins, which was…
Category: Malware
Salesforce Data Breach Suit Cites California Privacy Law
Daniel R. Stoller reports: Salesforce.com Inc. and a children’s clothing company face data-breach allegations in a federal court lawsuit that is among the first to cite California’s landmark privacy law since it took effect Jan. 1. Salesforce and Hanna Andersson failed to protect user data, safeguard platforms or provide cybersecurity warnings, alleges the complaint filed…
City of Racine attacked with ransomware
Christine Flores reports: Ransomware has infected the City of Racine’s computer systems. The doors at City Hall remained open Monday, Feb. 3. In fact, people were encouraged to conduct their business in person since the ransomware attack impacted the city’s website, email, and online payment system. Read more on CBS58.
DoppelPaymer Ransomware Sells Victims’ Data on Darknet if Not Paid
Lawrence Abrams reports: The DoppelPaymer Ransomware is the latest family threatening to sell or publish a victim’s stolen files if they do not pay a ransom demand. A new tactic being used by ransomware operators that perform network-wide encryption is to steal a victim’s files before encrypting any devices. They then threaten to publish or sell this…
New ransomware doesn’t just encrypt data. It also meddles with critical infrastructure
Dan Goodin reports on yet another sinister development involving ransomware attacks and strains: A ransomware strain discovered last month and dubbed Ekans contains the usual routines for disabling data backups and mass-encrypting files on infected systems. But researchers at security firm Dragos found something else that has the potential to be more disruptive: code that…
Genesis market 2020 overview, a bazaar for buying data out of compromised computers.
Under The Breach explains: A group of sophisticated hackers team up to sell the data of computers they managed to infect. The site began operating around the beginning of 2019 and only let users with an invitation code to join (it maintains this exclusivity until today). To find a person who has invitation codes is…