Tag: vaccine | SpinSafe

Covid vaccine study to Oil India: Targets under cyber attack

July 27, 2022/in Computer Security

From Covid vaccine research centres to banking and financial entities to PSU major Oil India Limited — a range of institutions came under cyber attack during the two years of the pandemic, Lt General (Dr) Rajesh Pant, the country’s top cybersecurity coordinator, has told The Indian Express.

While these attacks were “successfully thwarted,” said Lt Gen Pant, these have underlined the need for constant vigil and global cooperation.

Last week, Lok Sabha was told there have been 674,021 cyber attacks in the country this year until June — almost 3,700 cyber attacks a day, making India the third most impacted by network attacks in the world.

Expanding on this, Lt General Pant, the National Cyber Security Coordinator at the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS), said that health and banking were among the sectors hit hardest.

Lt Gen Pant said the April 2022 attack on Oil India in Assam was one of the “most serious” incidents of ransomware attacks. “There were over 200 computers of Oil India that got encrypted during the attack and operations of Oil India came to a halt for almost a week.”

A ransom of Rs 120 crore was demanded, in Bitcoins, from Oil India, with a threat of it being doubled. There was no negotiation or payment, said Lt Gen Pant.

Lt General (Dr) Rajesh Pant

The PSU resumed its operations by switching to another software and also hiring a US cybersecurity firm to help put operations back on track.

There has been a huge upswing in malware attacks and among the targets were at least half a dozen incidents when Covid vaccine research centres and institutions doing academic studies on immunization were targeted.

Incidentally, in UK and Germany, too, vaccine research and distribution centres came under sustained cyber threats.

In the banking and financial sectors, the past three months have seen several malware and ransomware attacks, Lt Gen Pant said, both in private and co-operative banks.

While he declined to identify these banks, he confirmed that the attacks have were “neutralized” and were logged in as “cyber security incidents” with CERT-IN (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team.) Last year’s figures for such incidents were…

Source…

Sternum Adds the Cybersecurity Expert Behind NotPetya Malware Vaccine to Its Security Leadership Team | News

May 19, 2022/in Computer Security

TEL AVIV, Israel–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 19, 2022–

Sternum, the pioneer in autonomous security and analytics for IoT devices, welcomes Amit Serper, a leading international cybersecurity expert, as its new Director of Security Research. As a veteran cybersecurity professional with a record of excellence in the field, Amit bolsters Sternum’s vast research capabilities with his decades of expertise in reverse engineering, vulnerability exploitation, and ethical hacking.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220519005910/en/

Amit Serper a leading international cybersecurity expert joins Sternum as its new Director of Security Research (Photo: Business Wire)

The global total of cyberattacks is surging year on year as hackers exploit the ever-growing trend toward digitalization. An uptick in international tensions is further exacerbating the trend as Russia allegedly unleashed its cyber-arsenal on Ukraine in the run-up to its ground incursion. Previously, the U.S. intelligence community blamed Moscow for NotPetya malware attacks on Ukrainian networks, which destroyed sensitive data on a variety of servers and spilled out beyond Ukraine to wreak havoc on businesses.

Amit Serper, who found a “vaccine” for NotPetya, now joins Sternum’s leadership team to lend the company his vast expertise in cybersecurity. Amit will be in charge of Sternum’s security research, leading its team of cybersecurity experts as they work to transform the IoT defense paradigm.

Before joining Sternum, Amit worked as the Director of Security Research for Akamai Technologies, a U.S. cloud and cybersecurity giant, where he focused on enterprise network protection. Prior to that, he held the offices of North American VP of Security Research for Guardicore, a network segmentation company, ahead of its acquisition by Akamai. Amit also held a number of positions in Cybereason, working his way up from Senior Security Researcher to VP for Security Strategy. His private sector career followed years of service in the Israeli military and intelligence, where he took on a variety of security roles and…

Source…

Hard Numbers: Global vaccine good news, rampant ransomware, 5G growing fast, Spanish wind power

December 17, 2021/in Internet Security

58.1: As of December 17, 56.6 percent of the global population has received at least one COVID vaccine shot. We sometimes don’t realize how big of an achievement this is from just a year ago, when frontline health workers were the first to get jabs.

11: A ransomware attack occurred every 11 seconds in 2021, according to one estimate. Earlier this year, hackers carried out their most famous attack to date against Colonial Pipeline, which supplies almost half of the oil and gas consumed in the US Eastern Seaboard.

540 million: Global 5G connections are expected to reach 540 million by the end of the year, according to a new report. That’s more than double the amount in all of 2020.

23.1: Wind became Spain’s top energy source this year, overtaking nuclear for the first time. Half of the country’s energy now comes from renewable sources, which the government hopes will help bring down sky-high power prices in 2021.

Source…