Joe Tidy reports: An ex-Canadian government IT worker has admitted to being a high-level hacker with a Russian cyber-crime group. Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins, from Quebec, Canada, has agreed to plead guilty in a Florida court. The 34-year-old was affiliated to the NetWalker ransomware crew, which has attacked companies, municipalities, hospitals, schools and universities. When he was…
Category: Of Note
Ransomware LockBit: a hundred victims per month in the first half
Valéry Rieß-Marchive reports: In the first half of the year, more than 420 victims were claimed on the showcase site of the LockBit 2.0 franchise. This figure is lower than the reality. But to what extent? The examination of clues present in the source code of the showcase site sheds new light… on the level of…
Former Uber security chief will have to face wire fraud charges in hack coverup
Uber’s former Chief Security Officer Joseph Sullivan will have to face wire fraud charges over his alleged role in covering up a 2016 hack that exposed the personal information of millions of Uber passengers and drivers. The breach and its aftermath continue to reverberate after it was disclosed that although Uber knew it had been…
Dangerous Ruling Says If Someone Goes Onto Your Openly Shared Google Drive, You Can Sue Them For Unauthorized Access
Mike Masnick writes: If you accidentally leave your Google Drive accessible to anyone with the URL, and someone goes there and deletes stuff, is that “unauthorized access” and a violation of the CFAA? To me, the answer should be absolutely not. But in this recent ruling the judge went the other direction (first noted by Evan Brown). So,…
Over 900,000 Kubernetes instances found exposed online
Bill Toulas reports: Over 900,000 misconfigured Kubernetes clusters were found exposed on the Internet to potentially malicious scans, some even vulnerable to data-exposing cyberattacks. […] Researchers at Cyble have conducted an exercise to locate exposed Kubernetes instances across the itnernet, using similar scanning tools and search queries to those employed by malicious actors. The results show a…
Ransomware Ransom Payments: A Geostrategic Risk
The following is a Google-translated statement addressing the significant and negative impact of ransom payments on the German economy and recommendations to reduce and eliminate the payment of ransoms. In the original German, “Lösegeldzahlungen bei Ransomware-Angriffen: ein geostrategisches Risiko” can be found at https://ransomletter.github.io/: Blackmail Trojans in the form of so-called ransomware have grown into…