John E. Dunn reports: Can anyone – or anything – take on well-resourced nation state hacking groups? Protected by anonymity and plausible deniability, conventional wisdom says not, but conventional wisdom ignores a company like Microsoft wielding a secret weapon with the power to hinder even the cleverest hacking group: lawyers. This, it has emerged, is…
Category: Of Note
Huge Swedish Data Leak Punished With (Only?) Half a Month’s Paycheck
Catalin Cimpanu reports: The Swedish government has exposed sensitive details on millions of citizens in one of the biggest government screw-ups ever, and the official responsible for the whole fiasco was fined only half of her’s monthly salary, which is 70,000 Swedish krona — or around $8,500. The leak happened in September 2015, when the…
“BestBuy” Admits to Hijacking Deutsche Telekom Routers With Mirai Malware
I was just thinking about this guy last night, and woke up to see that Catalin Cimpanu has an update on him: A 29-year-old man pleaded guilty in court on Friday to hijacking over 900,000 routers from the network of Deutsche Telekom, according to several reports in the German press [1, 2, 3, 4]. The…
U.S. Dept. Of Education Encourages Indiana To Improve Data Security
Claire McInerny reports: The U.S. Department of Education (USED) sent a letter to Superintendent Jennifer McCormick this month outlining problems with the Indiana Department of Education’s security around student data. The state receives grant money from USED for implementing security systems, which opened the state up to an audit. According to the USED letter, the audit’s “objective…
AlphaBay and Hansa taken down in coordinated operations by FBI and Dutch National Police
Takedown of AlphaBay and Hansa will lead to hundreds of new investigations in Europe Months of preparation and coordination have resulted today, 20 July 2017, in the takedown of two of the largest criminal Dark Web markets, AlphaBay and Hansa. Two major law enforcement operations, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the US…
Sentenced malware developer a ‘key resource’ for criminal networks
R. Robin McDonald reports that the hacker known as “Kolypto,” whose real name is Mark Vartanyan, has been sentenced in federal court in Atlanta to five years in prison. Federal prosecutors in Atlanta say Vartanyan developed, improved, and distributed a pernicious computer malware toolkit known as Citadel that targeted major financial and government institutions around the…