extortion

Europol Warns of Internet of Things Risk

In a newly released report, Europol’s European Cybercrime Center (EC3) warns that the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) threatens to strengthen the hand of organized cyber criminal groups and make life much more difficult for police and governments that wish to pursue them. EC3’s latest Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (iOCTA) says the “Internet of Everything” will greatly complicate the work of law enforcement creating “new opportunities for everything from cyber criminals to state actors to child abusers. The growing numbers of connected devices will greatly expand the “attack surface” available for cyber criminal activity, the EC3 warns. Cyber criminals may co-opt connected devices for use in common criminal activity (like denial of service attacks and spam campaigns). However, advancements like connected (“smart”) vehicles and infrastructure create openings for large scale and disruptive attacks. The report, which was published late last months, is a high level position paper and pulls data mostly […]

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John McAfee addresses the crowd at DEFCON 22

McAfee sideshow eclipses Defcon’s real security breakthroughs | Security – InfoWorld

The onetime technology wunderkind, who left a job working for Lockheed to turn his curiosity about computer viruses into a thriving, global corporation showed up at two Las Vegas hacker cons last week: B-Sides Las Vegas and DEFCON. He offered some off-the-cuff rebukes to firms like Google. He also rambled long and hard about the dark forces that pursue him: the U.S. government, the government of Belize, Central American drug cartels and script kiddies desperate for his (virtual) scalp. Everywhere he goes, people take his picture. Who are they working for? The phones and computers he buys are bugged. His movements are being tracked. Those in attendance were admonished to beware of government snooping — especially via mobile applications. “Without privacy there is no freedom,” McAfee intoned.   Listening to McAfee rant, it’s easy to forget there were plenty of folks walking the halls of Defcon, Black Hat, and B-Sides […]

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Microsoft Uses Courts To Take Down Malicious, Managed DNS Services

Microsoft Corp. has taken action against yet another cyber crime network, taking control of- and shutting down a managed DNS (domain name system) operated by the firm No-IP that were being abused by cyber criminals, the company said on Monday.   The domains were associated with malware families named Jenxcus and Bladabindi that are believed to have infected on some 7.5 million systems, globally. The malicious programs – which are used to spy on the operators of infected systems – use Dynamic DNS services like NO-IP to communicate with command and control systems used to manage infected systems. Dynamic DNS makes the malicious systems more difficult to trace. In a post on Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit blog, Richard Domingues Boscovich, the company’s Assistant General Counsel said that the company had filed a civil case on June 19 naming two foreign nationals: Mohamed Benabdellah and Naser Al Mutairi along with a U.S. company, Vitalwerks Internet Solutions, LLC (doing […]

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Code Spaces Probably A ‘Target of Opportunity’

The spectacular collapse this week of Code Spaces, a cloud-based code repository, may have been the result of a an unspectacular “opportunistic” hack, rather than a targeted operation, according to one cloud security expert. The sudden demise of the online application repository has sent shock waves through the tech industry, laying bare what some say are lax practices among many cloud-based application and infrastructure providers. But the attack itself was almost certainly the result of a larger, indiscriminate cyber criminal campaign, said Jeff Schilling, the Chief Security Officer of Firehost, a Texas-based secure cloud provider. “This is something we pretty frequently: companies get held ransom with a DDoS attack, and if that doesn’t work, (the attackers) will resort to doing other things,” Schilling told The Security Ledger. But Code Spaces almost certainly wasn’t the only company the extortionists worked on, Schilling said. Instead, the company was likely caught up in a wide net […]

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The Week in Data Breach: Pizza And Chinese Food

The news over the weekend was about more data breaches affecting chain restaurants. First, there are reports that the pizza chain Domino’s appears to have been hacked. The news came by way of an online post on Friday by a group claiming to have compromised servers used by Domino’s to store data on customers in France and Belgium. (Cached version of the announcement can be viewed here.) The group claims to have made off with information including the user name and password for 592,000 French customers and over 58,000 records from Belgian customers. It has asked Domino’s for payment of €30,000 in exchange for the data. The company has acknowledged the attack, but claims no customer financial data was stolen. In other news, the Chinese restaurant chain PF Chang’s acknowledged on Thursday that it was, indeed, the victim of a successful cyber attack that a breach last week that resulted […]

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