Tag Archive for: Reveal

Most Governments Were Hacked in the Past Year, Reports Reveal

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Cybersecurity professionals often urge organizations to think not of “if” they’ll be attacked, but “when” — and new studies indicate that for many governments around the globe, that “when” may have already happened.

A November 2021 international report from cybersecurity research and marketing consultancy CyberEdge found that 68.2 percent of surveyed government organizations were compromised by one or more cyber attacks within the past 12 months. Fifty-four percent believed such an event was “more likely to occur than not” within the coming year.

The report polled 1,200 public- and private-sector IT security professionals from 17 countries, and focused on organizations with at least 500 employees. Government respondents comprised 4.1 percent of respondents, or roughly 49 individuals.

A survey of 353 IT professionals at government agencies and educational institutions, provided to GovTech by data management solutions company Veeam, also found at least half of respondents suffering from cyber attacks. It reported that ransomware caused “outages” at 52 percent of public-sector organizations. That study captured responses from 28 countries between October 2021 and December 2021.

Both reports suggest that more than half of government agencies have fallen to attack — a significant rate, yet one that puts it ahead of the pack, according to CyberEdge. Just over 85 percent of its overall respondent group reported suffering a successful cyber attack within the past 12 months, and nearly 41 percent had fallen to six or more attacks — the highest ever recorded by this annual report. (The report does not specify how often agencies were re-victimized by the same threat types compared to falling to a variety of attacks. Cyber threats are diverse, including incidents like distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, ransomware and other malware and account takeovers.

More important than the sheer number of successful attacks an organization suffers may be how much damage these attacks deal, said Minnesota CISO Rohit Tandon.

Strong cyber protections enable an organization to limit the impacts of…

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Experts reveal why Facebook and Instagram keep crashing

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Mark Zuckerberg‘s Facebook and Instagram crashed for the second time in a month last night, while a string of banks, phone networks and fellow tech giants have also experienced major outages recently.

Even Britain’s biggest supermarket Tesco was brought to its knees by a hack of its website and app last month, leaving thousands of customers unable to order groceries for 48 hours and costing the retailer an estimated £40m in lost revenue.  

But what is behind all these website crashes and outages? Is it just a coincidence, a fundamental problem with back-end systems or is there something more sinister going on?

MailOnline has spoken to a number of cyber security and internet experts to find out the main reasons for the outages, beginning with the issues experienced by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. 

Technical difficulties: Facebook and Instagram crashed for the second time in a month last night, while a string of banks and other companies have also experienced outages recently

Technical difficulties: Facebook and Instagram crashed for the second time in a month last night, while a string of banks and other companies have also experienced outages recently

Matthew Hodgson, co-founder and CEO of Element and technical co-founder of Matrix, said Meta’s centralised back-end system was a key problem.

It means there is a single point of failure which can affect Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, rather than just one of the platforms. 

‘The spate of recent outages is an inevitable side-effect of massive centralisation, where companies like Facebook have ended up on the critical path of providing infrastructure for billions of people,’ Mr Hodgson told MailOnline.

‘Consumers end up unwittingly obliged to put all their eggs in one basket, and when inevitably some failure mode occurs for that company or its infrastructure (be it accidental or malicious) the end result is catastrophic.’

Internet scientist Professor Bill Buchanan also believes the internet has become too centralised. 

He’s called for systems to have multiple nodes so that a single failure doesn’t stop a service from working.

Hodgson agreed.

‘The solution is to decentralise apps like Facebook and WhatsApp, just as the web and email and internet itself has no central points of control or failure — so there’s simply no single company or…

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Internal docs reveal project ‘Columbus’, Apple’s huge push to improve App Review

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New internal documents filed as part of the Epic Games vs Apple trial have revealed Apple made a huge push in 2015 to improve its app review process for the App Store dubbed project ‘Columbus’.

Apple’s Trystan Kosmynka was asked about Columbus during day five of the trial, describing it as a move to “heavily invest in App Review automation and efficiency.”

In a presentation from late 2015 seen by iMore, Apple spoke about to the need to automate app review, making the process more efficient. The presentation begins with a quote from Pinterest’s Mike Beltzner that states anything Apple could do to reduce review times “would be perhaps the single most impactful change to our ability to ship great apps.”

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Apple highlighted that at the time it was receiving more than 60,000 submissions a week from 155 different countries and 24 different app categories. Apple listed a staggering 910 different types of rejection reasons given for apps. Notes from the presentation state:

Here’s the problem, the volume is immense and continues to grow. The complexity is insane… 155 countries and 910 different types rejection reasons today. They are looked at manually everytime starting from scratch and by different people (inconsistent). And all of this results in an SLA longer than developers should expect and even worse creates a great deal of anxiety and ill will between Apple and developers.

The presentation notes that in 2015 Apple recognized there were a “ton of scam apps” in the App Store, as noted by reviews. The goal of Columbus was to tackle this, reducing the number of manual reviews and the perceived review time for developers whilst improving quality and consistency.

The presentation highlights some big impact areas such as the top ten reasons for rejection. For example, 14% of apps were rejected because more information was needed, the biggest single reason for rejection. Apps were also rejected for exhibiting bugs (10%), having poor interfaces, crashing, and more.

The notes reveal 60% of app review submissions were updates rather than new apps, and that 20% were the stock ‘bug fixes and performance’ updates that really…

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Reveal your real number and someone could hack your accounts

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As long as the internet exists, there will be scams. This is an unfortunate reality. We can only hope to be as vigilant as possible, but even the most careful people out there can fall victim.

A little extra pocket money is always useful, especially during a pandemic. One way to supplement income is to sell your old stuff. This can become quite lucrative if you have the right item and buyer lined up. Tap or click here to see how easy it is to sell old trading cards on eBay.

There is always a risk of running into scammers when putting your things up for sale. You are getting in contact with strangers and sharing some personal information. Whether you use eBay, Craigslist or Poshmark, you have to be careful. You won’t believe the latest scam making the rounds.

Don’t OfferUp your information

A reporter from BusinessInsider specializing in scams was recently a victim of one and didn’t realize it until it was too late. She was selling furniture on OfferUp and got a message from a potential customer. The profile seemed legitimate enough.

The buyer asked the seller, Kelly Rissman, for her number. Despite OfferUp’s warning not to share this information with others, Rissman gave it over. The buyer then texted her, saying she needs verification that she is real. A verification code was then sent, along with some text in an unfamiliar language.

The language turned out to be Filipino and the text said Google Voice. This was a verification code sent by Google to activate the Voice account the scammer just created with Rissman’s number.

Google Voice allows you to make and receive calls and texts free of charge. A scammer who gets a hold of your number would need a verification code to activate the account. Once they have it, they can use Google Voice to cause all sorts of mischief using your phone number.

What if it’s too late?

If you’ve fallen victim to a scam like this, you can try signing in to get a new verification code. Google Voice only allows one account per number, so if you try to create a new account, it…

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