Tag Archive for: Worried

North Korea is testing hypersonic weapons. Should the West be worried? – WAMU – WAMU 88.5

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North Korea is testing hypersonic weapons. Should the West be worried? – WAMU  WAMU 88.5

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Businesses worried about cyberattacks during the holidays, report finds

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Washington — After a year of headline-grabbing ransomware attacks, businesses say they’re worried about the possibility they’ll face cyber intrusions this holiday season, a time when many of their cybersecurity operations rely on skeleton staffing. 

Boston-based cybersecurity firm Cybereason commissioned a survey of 1,206 cybersecurity professionals at organizations that experienced a ransomware attack during a holiday or weekend within the last year. A whopping 89% of the respondents from the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, and UAE indicated that they were concerned about a repeat cyber intrusion ahead of the holiday season. However, 36% said they had no “specific contingency plan in place to mount a response.”

“The question becomes, at what point does this concern from cyber professionals translate into an action plan?” Cybereason CEO Lior Div told CBS News. “Do organizations have the right tools, processes and people in place to deal with an attack specifically in the upcoming holiday season? Hackers love to hack when they know we’re distracted and not ready to respond.”

The study revealed that organizations in the healthcare (65%) and manufacturing (67%) sectors — two of the biggest targets for ransomware attacks — were among the industries least likely to have developed contingency plans.

Cybercriminals have expanded hacking operations to repeatedly target the healthcare industry amid the coronavirus pandemic, leading to worsened health outcomes and excess deaths at hospitals.


Critical medical systems targeted by hackers

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Ahead of Labor Day weekend, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a joint advisory warning of an “increase in highly impactful ransomware attacks occurring on holidays and weekends — when offices are normally closed — in the United States,” following a string of high-profile cyber incidents over long weekends.

Days later, Howard University in Washington, D.C. was forced to cancel classes for more than a week after…

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Why You Should Be Worried About Cyber Criminals

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…cyber criminals hit a hospital in Düsseldorf, Germany, with so-called ransomware, in which hackers encrypt data and hold it hostage until the victim pays a ransom. The ransomware invaded 30 servers at University Hospital Düsseldorf [Sept 10, 2019], crashing systems and forcing the hospital to turn away emergency patients. As a result, German authorities said, a woman in a life-threatening condition was sent to a hospital 20 miles away in Wuppertal and died from treatment delays

Cyber-crime can also halt health care. The San Diego Union-Tribune reporters Greg Moran and Paul Sisson wrote2:

A ransomware attack on Scripps Health’s computer network over the [first May 2021] weekend significantly disrupted care, forcing the giant healthcare provider to… postpone appointments set for Monday and divert some critical care patients to other hospitals… Electronic medical records were said to be down, forcing medical personnel to use paper records… also affecting ‘telemetry at most sites.’… The incident was serious enough to put all four Scripps hospitals in Encinitas, La Jolla, San Diego and Chula Vista on emergency bypass for stroke and heart attack patients, … Hospitals have become perennial targets of such high-tech heists.

Even before the pandemic, a record 764 American health care providers were hit by ransomware.1 Clinicians may wonder how they could possibly be accomplices to such disasters. The answer is clicking a link. Yes, just clicking a link in an email or a web page, which seems like an innocuous thing to do, can do damage. It is the internet equivalent of leaving the keys in your car with the engine running.

Clicking web links was never meant to be dangerous, but over time, technology changed; however, our thinking has not changed. Here are some of the twists and turns on a long, unplanned trip.

The Road to Cyber Mortality

Back in July 1945, The Atlantic Monthly published “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, PhD.3 World War II was ending, and Bush was Dean of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the war, he served as Director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development. By summer 1945, Bush already had a good idea how…

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What’s unique about leak of 533 million Facebook accounts, how are Indian users affected and should you also be worried

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Earlier this year, it emerged that personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries had been leaked online. In January, Alon Gal, CTO of cyber intelligence firm Hudson Rock, first reported that a Telegram bot was being used to sell phone numbers for free.



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The bot was using a vulnerability in a Facebook feature which allowed phone numbers linked to every account to be accessed for free.

This is not the first time that a data leak from Facebook has been reported — there have been numerous such instances in the past, with the most controversial among them in recent memory being the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 when it was reported that a political consulting and strategic communications firm had collected personal information of around 87 million people through a personality quiz app that many had accessed through Facebook.

So, why is this data breach making news? What is unique about it and what are the potential implications? We explain.

What is the nature of the data that was compromised and how was it leaked?

The leaked data comprises personal information such as names, Facebook ID, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, names of workplaces, date of birth, date of account creation, relationship status and bio. The data set did not include any financial information or passwords.

The data was obtained through scraping whereby all the information was extracted by exploiting a vulnerability in Facebook’s contact importer feature.

Mike Clark, Product Management Director at Facebook, has stated in a blog post that the data was not stolen by hacking into its system but by scraping its platform.

As the blog post states, scraping is a common tactic that often relies on automated software to lift public information from the internet. While…

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