For years, ransomware actors have developed new families and attack campaigns in increasing frequency and numbers. Such activity peaked in 2017 but then fell in tandem with cryptocurrency miners’ rise. This development was short-lived, however. Between Q4 2018 and Q1 2019, Malwarebytes observed a 195 percent increase in ransomware detections involving business targets. The rate was even greater compared to Q1 2018 at 500 percent.
Changing consumer demands posed a serious challenge to the IT industry; it pushed firms to brainstorm about quick product delivery. This demand eventually gave rise to the demand for collaboration between Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) teams, welcoming the DevOps trend. As a result, everything started progressing well with increased development, enhanced collaboration, advanced testing, high productivity and minimized time to market.
Britain should be prepared for a Category 1 cyber security emergency, according to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). This means that national security, the economy, and even the nation’s lives will be at risk. However, despite this harsh warning, UK businesses still aren’t taking proactive and potentially preventative action to stop these attacks from happening. So just where are UK businesses going wrong and can they turn things around before it’s too late?
Wikipedia was knocked offline in several countries after being hit by a coordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack over the weekend. The Wikimedia Foundation made a statement claiming that the company's server suffered a "massive" DDoS attack and that its Site Reliability Engineering team is working to stop the attack and restore services.
I recently volunteered as an AV tech at a science communication conference in Portland, OR. There, I handled the computers of a large number of presenters, all scientists and communicators who were passionate about their topic and occasionally laissez-faire about their system security. As exacting as they were with the science, I found many didn’t actually see a point to the security policies their institutions had, or they had actively circumvented them. A short survey heard reasoning like.
A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. A great example of (half) forgotten linked app this week via, quite unforgettably, from the Twitter CEO. I’m sure we all have linked services together as authentication of to bridge a data conduit just to do a trial or something and neglected to remove it afterwards. Well…. That lapse could come back to bite in the future.
The latest report published by the New Zealand Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT NZ) found that the country experienced its highest ever recorded quarterly financial losses due to cybercrime in Q2. The report claims that New Zealanders reported $6.5 million in direct losses nationwide in Q2 of 2019. A total of 1,197 incidents were recorded in the second quarter, over 21% more than the incidents reported in the first quarter.
If you’re in your mid-twenties or beyond, you will be familiar with people at family gatherings saying ‘remember when we didn’t have all these gadgets, and we used to actually talk to each other?’ The answer to this is ‘no’ – the level of conversation has remained largely unchanged, it’s just now we have gadgets and gizmos to occupy our attention during these moments of strained silence. I put it down to the Mandela effect.
TechCrunch reports that a security researcher stumbled across an exposed server on the internet containing databases with a total of more than 419 million records related to Facebook users. According to TechCrunch’s reporting, each database record contains a user’s unique Facebook account ID (from which it’s possible to determine a user name) and phone numbers attached to the account.
