Cyber Security Today: Ransomware attacks hit a record in September, and more

Ransomware attacks hit a record in September, and more.

Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Wednesday, October 25th, 2023. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com and TechNewsday.com in the U.S.

The number of successful ransomware attacks keeps climbing. NCC Group says criminal data leak sites listed 514 victims last month. It breaks the record set in July, when gangs listed 502 victim organizations. The claims of these sites are usually reliable. The U.S. continued to be the most attacked country.

And if that’s not bad enough there’s a new ransomware gang. Rhysida. It runs as a ransomware-as-a-service operation, say researchers at Kaspersky. It has a unique self-deletion mechanism. It also works on Windows 7 and 8.

On Monday I told listeners about the compromise of files sent to Okta’s support system. Since then several technology companies have acknowledged being victims. They include Cloudflare and 1Password, which makes a password manager. 1Password’s CTO says no user data was compromised.

A former IT member of the U.S. National Security Agency has pleaded guilty to six counts of attempting to transmit classified defence information last year to what he believed to be was a Russian agent. He was actually sending the stuff to an undercover FBI agent. He’ll be sentenced next April.

VMware has updated its warning to administrators running Aria Operations for Logs. Last week it urged the software be patched to fix multiple vulnerabilities. This week that notice was updated to that warn threat actors now have exploit code to take advantage of an unpatched server.

Worried about how much data the apps you like are collecting? Here’s something to think about: According to researchers at The Money Mongers, Threads is the most invasive of the 100 apps it studied. They include Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, LinkedIn, Uber Eats and more. Threads, you may recall, is trying to challenge the platform called X and its tweets. By the researchers’ standard, Threats collects 86 per cent of its users’ personal data. That may be OK if the users realize this. But also note that 51 per cent of the apps studied share their user data…