extortion

Parent Firm of Ashley Madison Faces Extinction Level Hack

In-brief: Following a security breach, Avid Life Media, the parent of Ashley Madison and other adult-focused hookup sites, said that it was on the trail of the culprits. The question is whether ALM and its various properties will survive the incident.

Digital ‘Exhaust’ may be the biggest Internet of Things Worry | WIRED

In-brief: digital ‘exhaust’ emitted by Internet of Things technologies may pose the biggest risk to personal privacy and security a researcher warns. 

New Ransomware, FessLeak, Taps Adobe Flash Flaws

In-brief: A new and sophisticated ransomware family dubbed “Fessleak” is spreading in malicious advertising (or “malvertising”) campaigns by exploiting newly disclosed flaws in Adobe’s Flash technology.

North Korea

N.S.A. Breached North Korean Networks Before Sony Attack – NY Times

The New York Times claims that the U.S. National Security Agency used intelligence gleaned from a clandestine operation to compromise North Korea’s cyber warfare unit to pin the blame for the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack on the reclusive Communist country. According to the story by David Sanger and Martin Fackler, the Obama Administration’s decision to quickly blame the hack on the DPRK grew out of a four year-old National Security Agency (NSA) program that compromise Chinese networks that connect North Korea to the outside world. The classified NSA program eventually placed malware that could track the internal workings of the computers and networks used by the North’s hackers and under the control of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, the North Korean intelligence unit, and Bureau 121, the North’s hacking unit, which mostly operates out of China. It has long been recognized that North Korea, which lacks a mature information technology infrastructure, does much of […]

Obama Signing

U.S. Sanctions 10 For Sony Hack, Keeps Mum on Evidence

  As the New York Times reports, the Obama administration doubled down on its recent allegation that the Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea (DPRK) was behind the hacking of Sony Pictures, announcing sanctions on 10 senior North Korean officials and several organizations in response to the incident. Paradoxically, the administration acknowledged that there is no evidence that the 10 officials took part in either ordering or planning the Sony attack. Instead, they described them as “central to a number of provocative actions against the United States,” the Times reported. Those ‘provocative actions’ were not described. The actions mirror the Administration’s controversial decision, in May, to charge five Chinese military officers in May, 2014, for their connection to computer hacking and cyber espionage campaigns directed at U.S. firms in the nuclear power, metals and solar products industries. In the case of the Chinese nationals, however, the FBI cited evidence linking the five military officers to […]