Andy Greenberg reports: Police forces around the world have increasingly used hacking tools to identify and track protesters, expose political dissidents’ secrets, and turn activists’ computers and phones into inescapable eavesdropping bugs. Now, new clues in a case in India connect law enforcement to a hacking campaign that used those tools to go an appalling step…
Category: Of Note
Russian “RSOCKS” Botnet Disrupted in International Cyber Operation
SAN DIEGO – The U.S. Department of Justice, together with law enforcement partners in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, have dismantled the infrastructure of a Russian botnet known as RSOCKS which hacked millions of computers and other electronic devices around the world. A botnet is a group of hacked internet-connected devices that are…
‘Too Much’ Data Breach Disclosure May Risk Additional Cyber Vulnerabilities
Isha Marathe reports: Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, cyberattacks had been on the rise, leading to provisions from regulatory bodies such as the mandatory disclosures of incidents to protect investors and alert other businesses alike. Now, some attorneys and cybersecurity experts are asking if forced reporting of breaches and attacks at the level of detail that the U.S….
Cloudflare Thwarted Largest Ever HTTPS DDoS Attack
The DDoS attack originated from 121 countries and was powered by a small botnet of only 5,067 hacked IoT devices. Debra Ahmed reports: Cloudflare has reported stopping a record-breaking HTTPS DDoS attack (distributed denial of service attack) this month. The company claims this attack peaked at 26 million requests per second (RPS), making it the largest ever…
SCOOP: Glenn County Office of Education paid $400k ransom after ransomware attack
On May 12, the Sacramento Valley Mirror (SVM) reported on a ransomware attack on the Glenn County Office of Education and school districts. According to GlennCOE, the attack began in the early morning of May 10, and as SVM reported: Put out of commission systemwide for GCOE, school districts, and schools were the Internet, the…
Cybercriminals use reverse tunneling and URL shorteners to launch ‘virtually undetectable’ phishing campaigns
Stephen Pritchard reports: A new way of carrying out phishing attacks is being adopted by criminal groups – and it could make threat actors virtually undetectable, security researchers warn. The technique involves using ‘reverse tunnel’ services and URL shorteners to launch large-scale phishing attacks. What’s more, the groups using these techniques leave no trace. Instead, threat actors…