John Hultquist, Ben Read, Oleg Bondarenko, and Chi-en Shen of FireEye explain: In early 2019, FireEye Threat Intelligence identified a spear phishing email targeting government entities in Ukraine. The spear phishing email included a malicious LNK file with PowerShell script to download the second-stage payload from the command and control (C&C) server. The email was…
Don’t Acquire a Company Until You Evaluate Its Data Security
The new issue of Harvard Business Review has an article by Chirantan Chatterjee and D. Daniel Sokol. It begins: When Marriott International acquired Starwood in 2016 for $13.6 billion, neither company was aware of a cyber-attack on Starwood’s reservation system that dated back to 2014. The breach, which exposed the sensitive personal data of nearly 500…
New Malicious Medical DICOM Image Files Cause HIPAA Headache
Sergiu Gatlan reports: Malicious DICOM files can be crafted to contain both CT and MRI scan imaging data and potentially dangerous PE executables, a process which can be used by threat actors to hide malware inside seemingly harmless files. Cylera’s Markel Picado Ortiz achieved this by taking advantage of a DICOM format design flaw which…
Ca: Personal information safe after cyber-attack: Stratford city hall officials
Terry Bridge reports: Stratford city hall was the target of an apparent cyber-attack, but officials do not believe personal information was compromised. The city first acknowledged the incident in a Sunday night in a Facebook post. Stratford Mayor Dan Mathieson said Monday the city has determined it was a ransomware attack, but IT staff “found…
IT Grids Aadhaar data theft case may be the biggest ever in India: Experts
U Sudhakar Reddy reports: The IT Grids case may not be the first FIR filed on basis of a complaint by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) but the magnitude of the case is huge according to data security researchers. The case pertaining to the Sevamitra app designed by the company for the Telugu…
A hacker has dumped nearly one billion user records over the past two months
Catalin Cimpanu reports: A hacker who spoke with ZDNet in February about wanting to put up for sale the data of over one billion users is getting dangerously close to his goal after releasing another 65.5 million records last week and reaching a grand total of 932 million records overall. The hacker’s name is Gnosticplayers,…