Vittoria Elliott, Dhruv Mehrotra, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman report: A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED. Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the…
Category: Of Note
Kept in the Dark — Meet the Hired Guns Who Make Sure School Cyberattacks Stay Hidden
Kept in the Dark Meet the Hired Guns Who Make Sure School Cyberattacks Stay Hidden By Mark Keierleber This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox. This article is published in partnership with WIRED…
Cyberattack on NHS causes hospitals to miss cancer care targets
Connor Jones reports: NHS execs admit that last year’s cyberattack on hospitals in Wirral, northwest England, continues to “significantly” impact waiting times for cancer treatments, and suspect this will last for “months.” During the attack, which began on November 25 2024, the main clinical system was pulled offline and by December 5 the teams were…
Cover-up Follow-up: Westend Dental starts notifying patients of October 2020 ransomware attack
In December, DataBreaches reported that the Indiana Attorney General’s Office had brought charges against Westend Dental for a number of HIPAA violations. The state had started investigating the dental practice after a patient complained about them not providing a copy of their records in response to a request. In looking into that complaint, the state…
Operation Heart Blocker: Disruption action deals blow to criminal cyber network HeartSender
During a disruption action on January 29, 2025, HeartSender servers and domains were seized by various police services. HeartSender is the name of a group of phishing software makers. The Cybercrime Team of the East Brabant police unit started an investigation at the end of 2022, after phishing software was found on the computer of…
Exclusive: Apex Custom Software hacked, threat actors threaten to leak the software (1)
On January 20, the hackers known as 0mid16B tweeted, “At 7:40AM 20th Jan (US time), a US healthcare software provider has been hacked. All data in server has been deleted. 48 hours left before we publish all data.” The attached screenshot showed a listing of medications, but without any patient information attached. Two days later,…