What a great — and thought-provoking — story by Andy Greenberg: For the past two weeks, observers of North Korea’s strange and tightly restricted corner of the internet began to notice that the country seemed to be dealing with some serious connectivity problems. On several different days, practically all of its websites—the notoriously isolated nation…
Category: Of Note
Inside Trickbot, Russia’s Notorious Ransomware Gang
Matt Burgess reports: WHEN THE PHONES and computer networks went down at Ridgeview Medical Center’s three hospitals on October 24, 2020, the medical group resorted to a Facebook post to warn its patients about the disruption. One local volunteer-run fire department said ambulances were being diverted to other hospitals; officials reported patients and staff were safe. The downtime at the Minnesota medical…
Hackers Move $3.55B Worth of Bitcoin From 2016 Bitfinex Hack
Omkar Godbole reports: Large amounts of bitcoin stolen from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex six years ago were moved by hackers early on Tuesday. “So far this morning, 94,643.29 bitcoins ($3.55 billion) have been moved in 23 transactions, from a wallet associated with a theft from Bitfinex in 2016, to a new address,” blockchain analytics firm…
Mobile phone operator Cosmote and parent company OTE fined by Hellenic DPA over 2020 data breach slapped with fine over data breach
Ekathimerini reports: Mobile phone operator Cosmote and parent company OTE have been slapped with fines of over 9 million euros by Greece’s Data Protection Authority over a breach of user records in September 2020. Specifically, the watchdog fined Cosmote 6 million euros for failing to protect a file containing the call histories of thousands of…
The high cost of mishandling data breaches, security reporting for financial services
Karen Hoffman reminds readers of the costs of poor security, reporting, in part: Last month, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fined Chase $125 million due to employees’ insecure practices, namely using WhatsApp and personal email accounts to transact official business, thus not adhering to SEC record-keeping requirements. Additionally, under a separate enforcement action,…
N.Korean internet downed by suspected cyber attacks -researchers
Josh Smith reports: North Korea’s internet appears to have been hit by a second wave of outages in as many weeks, possibly caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, researchers said on Wednesday. The latest incident took place for about six hours on Wednesday morning local time, and came a day after North Korea conducted…