In-brief: focusing on WannaCry, the ransomware delivered in last week’s attacks, misses the point. Organizations weren’t done in by the shoddy malware, but by a class-A offensive cyber weapon known as EternalBlue. Editor’s Note: this blog is cross posted from Digital Guardian’s Data Insider blog.
In-brief: A fatal flaw in its design slowed the spread of WannaCry, a virulent ransomware program that has infected more than 100,000 organizations and individuals globally.
In-brief: An analysis of 85,000 hacked Remote Desktop Protocol servers from the cyber criminal marketplace xDedic shows that education and healthcare networks were the most often targeted by hackers, who often used brute force password guessing to gain access.
In-brief: Researchers at universities in Germany, working with the security firm Trend Micro, discovered more than 100 vulnerabilities in GitHub code repositories simply by looking for re-used code from tutorials and other free code samples. The same method could be harnessed by cyber criminals or other sophisticated attackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities in software applications, the researchers warned.
In-brief: In a damning report, the FDA said that St. Jude Medical* knew about serious security flaws in its implantable medical devices as early as 2014, but failed to address them with software updates or other mitigations, or by replacing those devices. (Editor’s note: updated to include a statement from Abbott and comment from Dr. Kevin Fu. – PFR April 14, 2017)
