Tag Archive for: pandemic

How Hackers Outwit All Efforts to Stop Them: “It’s a Cyber Pandemic.”

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On the morning of January 11, the Federal Aviation Administration halted all airline takeoffs in the U.S. because of a glitch in a software system critical to flight safety. “There is no evidence of a cyberattack at this point,” said the White House press secretary. But would officials know it if it were? And would they disclose it to the public?

Those are fair questions, given that in 2015 it took the FAA two months to disclose that hackers had planted malware in one of its computer networks. The federal government keeps tight wraps on what it knows about threats to American businesses and individuals.

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If hackers did indeed attack the FAA, it would be business as usual in the world of cybersecurity. On the same day, according to research firm Cybersecurity Ventures, hackers posted more than 120,000 records stolen from the San Francisco Bay Area transit system’s police department, took down the websites of eight major Danish banks, including the central bank, and broke into military and government agencies in several Southeast Asian and European countries. They also hijacked the cloud-computing platforms of Microsoft and Salesforce, making off with millions of dollars worth of untraceable cryptocurrency.

That’s just on January 11. Every day of the year, hackers unleash a stream of major attacks against government agencies, companies and individuals. Last year, they took down emergency services, threatened regional power grids, disrupted patient care at major hospitals, brought trains to a halt, took over radio stations to sow panic among listeners with a fake crisis, set off air-raid alerts and attacked U.S. nuclear scientists. So far this year, hackers broke into the communications firm Slack and stole email addresses of more than 200 million Twitter users.

More than 70 million Americans are hit by cybercrimes every year, according to computer security research firm Purplesec, often leaving people defrauded, spied on or publicly humiliated by having private photos and other information published online. More than two-thirds of small businesses have been victimized by hackers at least once. Some experts believe that just about every large…

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How North Korea Used Crypto to Hack Its Way Through the Pandemic

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“You are mistaken if you think they will have moral compunction for attacking somebody else’s network,” Jang Se-iul, a graduate of Mirim College who served as an officer in the North Korean military before defecting to South Korea in 2008, said in an interview. “To them, cyberspace is a battlefield and they are fighting enemies out there hurting their country.”

Mr. Jang said North Korea first began building its electronic warfare capability for defensive purposes, but soon realized that it could be an effective offensive weapon against its digital enemies.

Around the time Mr. Jang arrived in Seoul, websites in South Korea and the United States were under a wave of cyber attacks. Going by names like Lazarus, Kimsuky and BeagleBoyz, North Korean hackers used increasingly sophisticated tools to infiltrate military, government, corporate and defense-industry networks around the world to conduct cyberespionage and steal sensitive data to aid its weapons development.

“Make no mistake, DPRK hackers are really good,” said Eric Penton-Voak, a coordinator at the U.N. panel of experts, during a webinar in April, using the acronym of North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “They look at really interesting and very gray, new areas of cryptocurrency because actually, A, no one really understands them, and B, they can exploit weakness.”

Usually, North Korean hackers breach foreign crypto wallets through phishing attacks, luring victims with fake LinkedIn recruiting pages or other bait, according to Chainaysis. Then the hackers use a complex set of financial instruments to transfer the stolen funds, moving the loot through cryptocurrency “mixers” that combine multiple streams of digital assets, making it harder to track the movement of one particular batch of cryptocurrency.

“They’re very methodical in how they launder them,” said Erin Plante, senior director of investigations for Chainalysis. “They’re very methodical in small amounts moving over long periods of time to ultimately try to evade investigators.”

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Pandemic Two Years On: The Security Challenge of Hybrid Working

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Two years ago, the Covid-19 pandemic forced millions of workers across the globe into remote working and turned the way we work on its head. Prior to the pandemic, flexible or remote working arrangements had been the exception in most organisations – yet overnight it became the norm.

Since then, you couldn’t move for endless (and varied) commentary about the ‘future of work’ – with predictions ranging from the complete abolition of offices, collapse of co-working spaces through to the return of full time office presence. Two years on and we’ve settled on a more middle ground – hybrid work.

The New Normal

As lockdown restrictions ease across the globe, we’ve witnessed many different approaches to hybrid working – whether a formal company policy, or a ‘choose how you work’ model. However, no matter the approach, one thing remains clear – flexibility is here to stay.

There have been many studies that reinforce this – and all of them put the onus on the employer. Global research from The Adecco Group found that 40% of workers are considering moving to jobs with more flexible options, 80% of employees said they’d be more loyal to their employer if they provided flexible working options according to Flexjobs, and the Gartner 2021 Digital Worker Experience Survey found that 43% said that flexible working hours helped them be more productive.

The benefits of a more hybrid model of working is therefore clear and resound – yet, as with any new trend, it brings with it a fresh and unique set of challenges from a security perspective.

Security Challenges of Hybrid Working

Risks in the connected home

IoT devices continue to grow in popularity – whether it’s smart assistants, fridges, doorbells, or thermostats. While they seem unconnected to working life, these devices create more entry points for cyber criminals. If a cybercriminal can hack a smart device (which aren’t always designed with safety in mind), they gain entry to any other device on the same network – including corporate devices. Luckily, many manufacturers are now taking IoT security a lot more seriously and adopting a security by design approach. For consumers, device security starts and…

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Billions required to prevent next pandemic, warns epidemic expert

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Governments must invest billions of dollars to prevent the next pandemic and begin constructing a library of vaccines for every single family of viruses, says the organisation charged with preparing the world for emerging infectious diseases.

Richard Hatchett, chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, said it could take as little as five years to create the vaccine bank that could be adapted when a threat was detected, to ensure the world could start vaccinating within 100 days.

Vaccine makers were able to deliver Covid-19 vaccines in record time partly because they were already developing jabs for Mers, another coronavirus. But Hatchett said that unless shots were prepared for other virus families, the world might not be as lucky next time.

“The core of the 100-day mission is built on this idea of looking at prototype viruses from the different viral families and doing as much of the work . . . in advance as possible. That’s a large but finite task,” he told the Financial Times ahead of a global pandemic preparedness summit next week in London.

The event comes as western countries ease restrictions to try to live with the virus and politicians are focused on the war in Ukraine.

Hatchett warned against “pandemic fatigue”, saying an outbreak was “not like a volcano where the eruption discharges the risk”. In fact, the increasingly interconnected world had created conditions ripe for disease outbreaks, including for other coronaviruses.

“Why would we take this to be the last [coronavirus]? We know there are other coronaviruses out there in the wild,” he said. “Some could be theoretically as infectious as Sars-Cov-2 and possibly with a mortality that is closer to Sars-Cov-1, or Mers. That would be truly terrifying.”

© Richard Cannon/FT

Hatchett said governments, business and citizens should think about protecting against pathogens like the world treated computer viruses. “We don’t think about computer threats as, ‘Oh, Stuxnet, it’s gone, we have the patch and we don’t need to worry about cyber security any more’,” he said, referring to the computer worm originally aimed at Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Cepi…

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