Tag Archive for: records

‘Daam’ virus can steal all records from your phone, alerts cyber security agency

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New Delhi:An Android malware called ‘Daam’ that infects mobile phones and hacks into sensitive data like call records, contacts, history and camera has been found to be spreading, the national cyber security agency has said in its latest advisory.

The virus is also capable of “bypassing anti-virus programs and deploying ransomware on the targeted devices”, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team or CERT-In said.

The agency is the federal technology arm to combat cyber attacks and guard the cyber space against phishing and hacking assaults and similar online attacks.

The Android botnet gets distributed through third-party websites or applications downloaded from untrusted/unknown sources, the agency said.

“Once it is placed in the…

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Singapore Records Highest Increase in Ransomware Attacks in 2023, According to Sophos

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Sophos on Wednesday released its annual “State of Ransomware 2023” report, which found that the rate of ransomware attacks on Singaporean organisations increased considerably in 2022 with 84 per cent of organisations surveyed saying they were a victim of ransom, which compares to 65 per cent the year before. This increase meant that Singapore reported the highest rate of ransomware attacks of all countries surveyed this year.

In 61 per cent of attacks on surveyed organisations, adversaries succeeded in encrypting data with 53% of those who had data encrypted paying the ransom to get their data back. This is up from 48 per cent last year and higher than the global average of 47 per cent.

On a global scale, the survey also shows that when organisations paid a ransom to get their data decrypted, they ended up additionally doubling their recovery costs (US$750,000 in recovery costs versus US$375,000 for organisation that used backups to get data back). Moreover, paying the ransom usually meant longer recovery times, with 45 per cent of those organisations that used backups recovering within a week, compared to 39 per cent of those that paid the ransom.


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When analyzing the root cause of ransomware attacks, the most common was an exploited vulnerability (involved in 43 per cent of cases), followed by compromised credentials (involved in 26 per cent of cases). This is in line with recent, in-the-field incident response findings from Sophos’ 2023 Active Adversary Report for Business Leaders.

Data for the State of Ransomware 2023 report comes from a vendor-agnostic survey of 3,000 cybersecurity/IT leaders conducted between January and March 2023. Respondents were based in 14 countries across the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific and Japan. Organisations surveyed had between 100 and 5,000 employees, and revenue ranged from less than US$10 million to more than US$5 billion.

Source: https://www.sophos.com/en-us/content/state-of-ransomware

Chester Wisniewski, field CTO, Sophos

Rates of encryption are very high, which is certainly concerning. Ransomware crews have been refining their methodologies of attack and accelerating their attacks to reduce the time for defenders to…

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Records show Suffolk IT employess knew of bitcoin mining before ransomware attack

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A Newsday investigation into the cyber hack that crippled Suffolk County uncovered records that show county IT employess knew of bitcoin mining but didn’t stop it. NewsdayTV’s Sandra Peddie reports.

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Hacking healthcare: With 385M patient records exposed, cybersecurity experts sound alarm on breach surge

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Healthcare companies more than ever are using electronic records and tapping digital services. That’s also creating more opportunities for cybercriminals — who already have exposed the private medical information of millions of patients — and bolsters the case for the industry to make security priority No. 1, experts say.

Healthcare breaches have exposed 385 million patient records from 2010 to 2022, federal records show, though individual patient records could be counted multiple times.

Hacking incidents, a type of breach, at healthcare firms have skyrocketed in the past five years as cybercriminals demand ransoms in exchange for restoring access to sensitive medical data.

Hacking or IT incident is the most common breach type

Other types include unauthorized access/disclosure, theft, loss, improper disclosure, other and unknown.

While healthcare companies have to improve their cybersecurity given the rise in breaches and cyberattacks, regulators need to raise the bar on cybersecurity standards, experts told Healthcare Dive.

“Could all these organizations do a better job? Absolutely,” said Jim Trainor, former assistant director of the Cyber Division at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and who is now a senior vice president of Aon Cyber Solutions, a global professional services firm.

Disrupting any one of the nation’s 16 critical infrastructure sectors, including the healthcare industry, poses a national security threat. These sectors are vital to daily life for millions of Americans and disabling them would have a debilitating effect on society, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, the country’s cyber defense agency.


Cyberattacks that disrupt hospital operations put patients’ lives at risk. The FBI said that the healthcare industry was hit the hardest by ransomware attacks in 2021 compared to other critical infrastructure. And the threats come as hospitals struggle with staffing shortages and financial pressures exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the wake of a ransomware attack on one of the nation’s largest hospital operators last year, Healthcare Dive analyzed more than 5,000 breaches…

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