Threat Source (April 4)

Welcome to this week’s Threat Source newsletter — the perfect place to get caught up on all things Talos from the past week. If you haven’t yet, there’s still time to register for this year’s Talos Threat Research Summit — our second annual conference by defenders, for defenders. This year’s Summ...

Encrypted Messaging Project "Matrix" Suffers Extensive Cyber Attack

Matrix—the organization behind an open source project that offers a protocol for secure and decentralized real-time communication—has suffered a massive cyber attack after unknown attackers gained access to the servers hosting its official website and data. Hackers defaced Matrix's website, and...

Was this really an attempt by the Chinese?

Last weekend, during President Trump’s visit to the Mar-a-Lago resort, a 23-year-old Chinese woman attempted to gain access to the Florida resort by lying and bluffing her way in. After some discussion at the gate, she was escorted to the reception of the resort where it was found out that she wa...

Ransomware Attack Forces Aluminum Manufacturer to Shutdown Systems Worldwide

--- Photo by Terje Pedersen / NTB scanpix One of the world's largest producers of aluminum has been forced to shut down several of its plants across Europe and the U.S. after an "extensive cyber attack" hit its operations, leaving companies' IT systems unusable. According to a press release share...

Norsk Hydro Calls Ransomware Attack 'Severe'

Aluminum giant Norsk Hydro has fallen victim to a serious ransomware attack that has forced it to shut down or isolate several plants and send several more into manual mode, the company said on Tuesday morning. Oslo, Norway-based Norsk Hydro, one of the world’s largest makers of aluminum, employs...

Patched WinRAR Bug Still Under Active Attack—Thanks to No Auto-Updates

Various cyber criminal groups and individual hackers are still exploiting a recently patched critical code execution vulnerability in WinRAR, a popular Windows file compression application with 500 million users worldwide. Why? Because the WinRAR software doesn't have an auto-update feature, whic...

Modern Cybercrime: It Takes a Village

LAS VEGAS – Contrary to the pop-culture image of the hoodie-clad lone hacker with mad keyboard “skillz” siphoning off funds and making people’s lives miserable with a few lines of brilliant code, increasingly cybercrime “takes a village”. The true face of cybercrime today is a more democratic one...

Airbus Suffers Data Breach, Some Employees' Data Exposed

European airplane maker Airbus admitted yesterday a data breach of its "Commercial Aircraft business" information systems that allowed intruders to gain access to some of its employees' personal information. Though the company did not elaborate on the nature of the hack, it claimed that the...

Cryptopia cryptocurrency exchange hacked; suffers “significant losses”

By Waqas Cryptopia, a New Zealand based cryptocurrency exchange has undercome a cyber attack leading to “significant losses.” The incident took place on January 14 and upon detecting the attack Cryptopia was forced to halt services by taking their website and exchange offline. Initially, on its...

ThreatList: $1.7M is the Average Cost of a Cyber-Attack

The average cost estimate for cleaning up a cyberattack comes in at around $1.1 million, according to a recent survey. But this is actually a rosy view: For those organizations that actually calculate versus estimate the real cost of an attack, that number increases significantly to $1.67 million...

School hackers steal personal data of half a million students & staff

By Waqas A school district in the United States has suffered a cyber attack in which unknown hackers managed to steal a trove of personal data belonging to over 500,000 staff and students. The targeted school was San Diego Unified School District in California whose database was accessed by hacke...

Microsoft Issues Emergency Patch For Under-Attack IE Zero Day

Microsoft today issued an out-of-band security update to patch a critical zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer IE Web browser that attackers are already exploiting in the wild to hack into Windows computers. Discovered by security researcher Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Grou...

New Shamoon Malware Variant Targets Italian Oil and Gas Company

Shamoon is back… one of the most destructive malware families that caused damage to Saudi Arabia's largest oil producer in 2012 and this time it has targeted energy sector organizations primarily operating in the Middle East. Earlier this week, Italian oil drilling company Saipem was attacked and...

New Shamoon Malware Variant Targets Italian Oil and Gas Company

Shamoon is back… one of the most destructive malware families that caused damage to Saudi Arabia's largest oil producer in 2012 and this time it has targeted energy sector organizations primarily operating in the Middle East. Earlier this week, Italian oil drilling company Saipem was attacked and...

SamSam Ransomware

Summary The Department of Homeland Security DHS National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center NCCIC and the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI are issuing this activity alert to inform computer network defenders about SamSam ransomware, also known as MSIL/Samas.A. Specifically, th...

First Annual Cyberwarcon

Cyberwarcon is a brand new event organized yesterday in Arlington, Virginia, and delivered eight hours of fantastic content. "CyberwarCon is a one-day conference in the Washington D.C. area focused on the specter of destruction, disruption, and malicious influence on our society through cyber...

Today’s Data Breach Environment: An Overview

By now, companies and consumers alike are well aware of the threat of a data breach. Large and small businesses across every sector have been targeted, and many customers are now familiar with the notification that their username, password or other details might have been compromised. The...

Uber fined $1.1 million by UK and Dutch regulators over 2016 data breach

British and Dutch data protection regulators Tuesday hit the ride-sharing company Uber with a total fine of $1,170,892 1.1 million for failing to protect its customers' personal information during a 2016 cyber attack involving millions of users. Late last year, Uber unveiled that the company had...

Two TalkTalk hackers jailed for 2015 data breach that cost it £77 million

Two hackers have been sent to prison for their roles in hacking TalkTalk, one of the biggest UK-based telecommunications company, in 2015 and stealing personal information, banking, and credit card details belonging to more than 156,000 customers. Matthew Hanley, 23, and Connor Allsopp, 21, both...

6500 sites down after hackers wipe out database of dark web hosting firm

By Waqas Daniel's Hosting, one of the largest hosting service providers on Dark Web has come under a massive cyber attack forcing its website along with over 6,500 websites hosted on its server to go offline but the damage is way more than that. The hosting administrator, a German software...