The energy sector in Europe and North America is being targeted by a new wave of cyber attacks that could provide attackers with the means to severely disrupt affected operations. The group behind these attacks is known as Dragonfly. The group has been in operation since at least 2011 but has re-emerged over the past two years from a quiet period following exposure by Symantec and a number of other researchers in 2014. This “Dragonfly 2.0” campaign, which appears to have begun in late 2015, shares tactics and tools used in earlier campaigns by the group.The energy sector has become an area of increased interest to cyber attackers over the past two years. Most notably, disruptions to Ukraine’s power system in 2015 and 2016 were attributed to a cyber attack and led to power outages affecting hundreds of thousands of people. In recent months, there have also been media reports of […]

One of the convenient fictions of ransomware attacks is that the cybercriminals who operate ransomware schemes have no interest in the data they’re encrypting – they just want to get paid. By this logic, ransomware attacks aren’t data breaches because the data isn’t exfiltrated or stolen – just encrypted and left where it is.And it’s a popular fiction, at that. The latest ransomware victim caught peddling this fiction is Dorchester County, South Carolina, where School District officials have acknowledged that 25 of 64 servers operated by the district were infected with ransomware. The infection prompted the district to pay $2,900 in ransom to have the data decrypted, according to a report by a local ABC News affiliate.“A thorough investigation determined this was a ransom request and there was no identity theft involved and no student or staff information had been accessed or compromised,” the District said in its statement. This, […]