Tag Archive for: private

Ransomware criminals are dumping kids’ private files online after school hacks

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The confidential documents stolen from schools and dumped online by ransomware gangs are raw, intimate and graphic. They describe student sexual assaults, psychiatric hospitalizations, abusive parents, truancy — even suicide attempts.

“Please do something,” begged a student in one leaked file, recalling the trauma of continually bumping into an ex-abuser at a school in Minneapolis. Other victims talked about wetting the bed or crying themselves to sleep.

Complete sexual assault case folios containing these details were among more than 300,000 files dumped online in March after the 36,000-student Minneapolis Public Schools refused to pay a $1 million ransom. Other exposed data included medical records, discrimination complaints, Social Security numbers and contact information of district employees.

Rich in digitized data, the nation’s schools are prime targets for far-flung criminal hackers, who are assiduously locating and scooping up sensitive files that not long ago were committed to paper in locked cabinets. “In this case, everybody has a key,” said cybersecurity expert Ian Coldwater, whose son attends a Minneapolis high school.

Often strapped for cash, districts are grossly ill-equipped not just to defend themselves but to respond diligently and transparently when attacked, especially as they struggle to help kids catch up from the pandemic and grapple with shrinking budgets.

Months after the Minneapolis attack, administrators have not delivered on their promise to inform individual victims. Unlike for hospitals, no federal law exists to require this notification from schools.

The Associated Press reached families of six students whose sexual assault case files were exposed. The message from a reporter was the first time anyone had alerted them.

“Truth is, they didn’t notify us about anything,” said a mother whose son’s case file has 80 documents.

Even when schools catch a ransomware attack in progress, the data are typically already gone. That was what Los Angeles Unified School District did last Labor Day weekend, only to see the private paperwork of more than 1,900 former students — including psychological evaluations and medical records — leaked online….

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Chinese spies breached hundreds of public, private networks, security firm says | Associated Press

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Suspected state-backed Chinese hackers used a security hole in a popular email security appliance to break into the networks of hundreds of public and private sector organizations globally, nearly a third of them government agencies including foreign ministries, the cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Thursday.

“This is the broadest cyber espionage campaign known to be conducted by a China-nexus threat actor since the mass exploitation of Microsoft Exchange in early 2021,” Charles Carmakal, Mandiant’s chief technical officer, said in a emailed statement. That hack compromised tens of thousands of computers globally.

In a blog post Thursday, Google-owned Mandiant expressed “high confidence” that the group exploiting a software vulnerability in Barracuda Networks’ Email Security Gateway was engaged in “espionage activity in support of the People’s Republic of China.” It said the activivity began as early as October.

The hackers sent emails containing malicious file attachments to gain access to targeted organizations’ devices and data, Mandiant said. Of those organizations, 55% were from the Americas, 22% from Asia Pacific and 24% from Europe, the Middle East and Africa and they included foreign ministries in Southeast Asia, foreign trade offices and academic organizations in Taiwan and Hong Kong. the company said.

Mandiant said the majority impact in the Americas may partially reflect the geography of Barracuda’s customer base.

Barracuda announced on June 6 that some of its its email security appliances had been hacked as early as October, giving the intruders a back door into compromised networks. The hack was so severe the California company recommended fully replacing the appliances.

After discovering it in mid-May, Barracuda released containment and remediation patches but the hacking group, which Mandiant identifies as UNC4841, altered their malware to try to maintain access, Mandiant said. The group then “countered with high frequency operations targeting a number of victims located in at least 16 different countries.”

Word of the breach as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken departs for China this weekend as part of the Biden…

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Intel Boot Guard private keys have reportedly leaked, compromising the security of many computers

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It seems like every other day there are scumbags out there perpetrating a new hack, taking advantage of a vulnerability or trying to extort people with ransomware. MSI is the latest victim, with hackers leaking material stolen from a breach of MSI’s systems last month (opens in new tab).

This one has the potential to be serious. According to tweets by Alex Matrosov (opens in new tab), the founder of Binarly (opens in new tab), at least some of the previously stolen 1.5TB of data has been leaked. The data includes private keys, some of which appear to be Intel Boot Guard keys. The leak of such keys doesn’t just affect MSI systems, but those from other vendors too, including Lenovo and Supermicro.

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iboss Adaptive Private Access for Zero Trust Networks Provides Greater Protection Against Advanced Threats and Malware than Competitors in Independent Laboratory Tests

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At iboss, we are hyper focused on creating technology that makes it easier for organizations to implement a complete Zero Trust Network Architecture to better protect organizations in this modern-day work from anywhere environment


BOSTON (PRWEB)

iboss, the leader in cloud-delivered cybersecurity, today announced the results of its third-party efficacy testing for its iboss Zero Trust Adaptive Access for Zero Trust Networks, which was rigorously tested for its malware blocking effectiveness by Miercom, a premier independent testing laboratory. The report concluded that iboss Adaptive Private Access delivered superior malware threat protection and is the only service that provides continuous inspection of Private Access traffic.

The test evaluated iboss’s Adaptive Private Access technology. This cloud native Zero Trust platform protects organizations by ensuring employees or devices accessing sensitive cloud apps are redirected through iboss’s Adaptive Private Access, which acts as a checkpoint that continuously monitors for threats to the protected cloud app. When iboss Adaptive Private Access adaptive identifies a threat, the platform cuts access immediately and automatically, with no human intervention, to prevent infections from spreading and corporate data from being stolen. The test results proved that iboss exceeded the requirements set forth by Miercom, blocking 99.7% of malware, and performed 26% higher in malware blocking effectiveness than the industry average of all platforms tested by Miercom to date.

“At iboss, we are hyper focused on creating technology that makes it easier for organizations to implement a complete Zero Trust Network Architecture to better protect organizations in this modern-day work from anywhere environment,” said Paul Martini, CEO and co-founder of iboss. “This result confirms our commitment to providing the most comprehensive security solution for organizations of all sizes.”

The report concluded that iboss Adaptive Private…

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