Lawrence Abrams reports: Mexico’s state-owned oil company, Pemex, has suffered a DoppelPaymer ransomware attack that demanded $4.9 million USD in order to decrypt their files. On Sunday, November 10th, Pemex was hit with a ransomware attack that the company states affected less than 5% of their computers. Workers reported, though, that internal memos told them not to initially…
Israel Extradites Accused Russian Cybercriminal to U.S. (Updated)
Felicia Schwartz and Dustin Volz report: Israel said Tuesday that alleged Russian hacker Alexei Burkov, whom the Kremlin attempted to recover in an unusual prisoner exchange, was extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for a range of hacking-related crimes, including fraud, identity theft, computer intrusion and money laundering. According to the American request for…
Aussie ‘E-Crime Squad’ arrests crypto exchange owner, seizing his Bitcoin ATM
Yessi Bello Perez reports: Australian detectives have arrested a 38-year-old man as part of an investigation into an unregistered cryptocurrency exchange. The man, a resident in Cairnlea — a Melbourne suburb — was arrested at home, where police seized “a substantial amount of cash and false identification documents.” Authorities also seized a cryptocurrency ATM from a shopping mall in nearby Braybrook, which according to Google Maps is approximately 8 kilometres away from Cairnlea. Read more…
Large-scale cyberattack hits Labour Party systems
Danny Palmer reports: The Labour Party has been hit with what it describes as a “sophisticated and large-scale cyberattack”. A Labour spokesperson told ZDNet that the cyberattack affected the party website and online campaigning tools and platforms, which were offline for some time yesterday while the IT and digital teams worked to get things back…
Retailer Orvis.com Leaked Hundreds of Internal Passwords on Pastebin
Brian Krebs reports: Orvis, a Vermont-based retailer that specializes in high-end fly fishing equipment and other sporting goods, leaked hundreds of internal passwords on Pastebin.com for several weeks last month, exposing credentials the company used to manage everything from firewalls and routers to administrator accounts and database servers, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Orvis says the exposure was…
Enhancing the Security of Data Breach Notifications and Settlement Notices
Ryan Amos, Mihir Kshirsagar, Ed Felten, and Arvind Narayanan write: We couldn’t help noticing that the recent Yahoo and Equifax data breach settlement notifications look a lot like phishing emails. The notifications make it hard for users to distinguish real settlement notifications from scams. For example, they direct users to URLs on unfamiliar domains that are not clearly…