Tag Archive for: professional

Cybersecurity professional arrested on charges of hacking Atlanta-area hospitals

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Vikas Singla, the chief operating officer of a network security company based in Atlanta, has been arrested and charged with allegedly hacking a local not-for-profit health care provider in 2018.

Mr. Singla, 45, made his initial appearance in federal court Thursday and was arraigned on 18 counts stemming from what the Department of Justice described as a cyberattack on the Gwinnett Medical Center.

Prosecutors allege the defendant hacked into computers that controlled a phone system and 16 printers at hospitals operated by Gwinnett, which runs facilities in the cities of Duluth and Lawrenceville, Ga.

Mr. Singla, of nearby Marietta, also stands accused of hacking into a computer belonging to the medical center and stealing information “for purposes of commercial advantage and private financial gain.”

“This cyberattack on a hospital not only could have had disastrous consequences, but patients’ personal information was also compromised,” said Chris Hacker, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta field office. “The FBI and our law enforcement partners are determined to hold accountable those who allegedly put people’s health and safety at risk while driven by greed,” he said in a statement.

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How Hacking Became a Professional Service in Russia

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DarkSide’s most high-profile hacking operation may prove to be its last: in early May, the group launched a ransomware attack against the Colonial Pipeline Company, which provides as much as half the fuel supply for the East Coast of the United States. As the effects of the hack mounted, the company shut down the pipeline, and that led to a spike in the price of gasoline, as well as days of widespread fuel shortages. President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency. DarkSide reportedly walked away with a five-million-dollar ransom, but receiving the payout appears to have come at a cost. On May 14th, DarkSide’s site went down, and the group said that it has lost access to many of its communication and payment tools—as a result of either retaliation from the U.S. or a decision by the members who fund the organization to pull the plug themselves.

DarkSide is a so-called ransomware-as-a-service enterprise, meaning that it does not actually perform the labor of carrying out cyberattacks. Instead, it provides affiliated hackers with a range of services, from handling negotiations to processing payments. It had a blog and a user-friendly interface for hackers to upload and publish stolen information. When DarkSide débuted on Russian-language cybercrime forums, last August, its launch announcement sounded like a tech entrepreneur’s pitch deck. “We created DarkSide because we didn’t find the perfect product for us,” it read. “Now we have it.” It set out a sliding fee scale, ranging from twenty-five per cent of ransoms worth less than half a million dollars to ten per cent of those worth five million or more.

Ransomware as a service, like the modern tech economy as a whole, has evolved to account for a high degree of specialization, with each participant in the marketplace providing discrete skills. An operation such as DarkSide’s attack against Colonial Pipeline begins with an individual or team of hackers known as “individual access brokers,” who penetrate a target company’s network. From that point, another hacker moves laterally to the domain controller, the server in charge of security and user access, and installs the ransomware code there. (DarkSide, among…

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Why Small and Medium-Sized Professional Service Firms Are a Big Target for Ransomware Attacks

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If you focus only on the headlines, even in the specialist tech press, you’d be forgiven for thinking that ransomware attacks were mainly a problem for larger businesses and institutions. Those incidents which make the news tend to feature attention-grabbing numbers. These can be either in the size of ransoms demanded or the costs of restoration and recovery. Another type of attack that will always get in the news, would be related to vital services – the hospitals, schools, police departments, or other government services – whose disruption is likely to cause widespread concern. When a major bank, tech firm, logistics or telecoms provider, or well-known institution is knocked offline for days at a time, it tends to make the news.

At the other end of the scale are the individuals, and perhaps micro-businesses, hit by entirely automated malware infections. In these cases, mostly ultimately traceable to a spam email, or malicious advertisement in a video game, someone’s personal PC or laptop has been locked up and cherished photos, a draft of a novel or list of local customers is leveraged to extort a few hundred dollars in Bitcoin. 

For much of the history of the ransomware threat, these have been the bulk of the victims, and the topic of most of the scare stories, at least until the rise of cloud services and automated duplication of data across devices gave us all an easy way to back up our data. But in between these two, there is another group which gets far less attention than it should – small to medium-sized businesses, many of them providing professional services such as legal or financial advice. Small businesses are the largest employer in the US, and make up the foundation of the US economy.  The impact prevalence of ransomware on this industry segment stands out from other industries.

Ransomware Stats for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

Coveware’s latest set of statistics from Q3 of 2020 show that more than 70% of ransomware incidents were companies with fewer than 1,000 employees, and 60% had revenues of less than $50 million. Looking at the breakdown by industry sector, more than a quarter of companies are in the professional services category, by…

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Mobile Security Market with (Covid-19) Impact Analysis: In-depth Analysis, Global Market Share, Top Trends, Professional & Technical Industry Insights 2020 – 2025 – 3rd Watch News

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Mobile Security Market with (Covid-19) Impact Analysis: In-depth Analysis, Global Market Share, Top Trends, Professional & Technical Industry Insights 2020 – 2025  3rd Watch News
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