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.
Nowadays, most of the IT systems use file-based architectures to store and process information. In addition, the critical applications such as operating systems, application binaries, configuration data of systems and applications, organization’s sensitive data, logs, and data which is pertinent to security events are stored in files. If any of these files is compromised, the financial and reputational damage occur to organizations.
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?
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.
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.
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 phone numbers associated with over 400 million Facebook accounts were exposed online in the latest privacy dilemma for the social media giant. TechCrunch reported on Wednesday that an exposed server storing 419 million records was found online - 133 million belonging to U.S. users, 50 million Vietnamese users, and 18 million U.K. users. This server was not protected with a password, meaning anyone could access the database up until late yesterday evening once the host took down the site.
