Category: Hacking

UPDATE–Police in Ukraine have confiscated several servers from the software company that develops the M.E. Doc accounting software that is believed to have been an unwitting part of the distribution process for the NotPetya ransomware. Soon after the emergence of NotPetya last week, security researchers from several organizations zeroed in on the update mechanism for the…

The NotPetya ransomware that hit thousands of computers last week likely was created and launched by state-sponsored attackers, according to a new analysis by security experts at NATO. Based on the complexity and estimated cost of the operation, analysts at NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence concluded that NotPetya either was the work of…

UPDATE–Security researchers are continuing to delve into the details of the latest ransomware outbreak, and have found that the ExPetr ransomware has a number of interesting characteristics that separate it from other variants and raise questions about its purpose. The ExPetr or NotPetya ransomware shares some code and behavior with the older Petya ransomware, but researchers…

A fast-moving ransomware attack has hit a number of companies in several European countries and the United States, the second such widespread ransomware outbreak in as many months. The attack was originally thought to be a new variant of the Petya ransomware, but researchers have said that it appears to be an entirely new ransomware strain. There…

Anthem Inc., the victim of one of the more extensive data breaches in U.S. history, has agreed to pay a settlement of $115 million to consumers affected by the incident. The settlement is believed to be the largest ever to result from a data breach in the U.S. and would end a class-action lawsuit that followed…

More than a month after the WannaCry ransomware began making its way through networks around the world, the worm still is causing serious trouble in some places. Honda this week had to shut down an auto assembly plant temporarily due to a WannaCry infection, and the ransomware also has hit traffic cameras in Australia. Officials…

By Jonah Berg-Ganzarain A few days after the personal data of nearly 200 million registered American voters was accidently exposed online due to an “improperly configured security setting”, some of the people affected by the breach have filed a class-action lawsuit against the analytics company responsible for the leak. A total of 1.1 terabytes of data…

Microsoft is making the bug bounty for its Edge browser a permanent program, a significant change to the way the company incentivizes researchers to find vulnerabilities in the application. It’s been a little less than a year since Microsoft launched the bounty as a temporary offering with the Windows 10 Insider Preview. The idea was…

The mobile ransomware infections that hit a number of universities in the U.K. recently have been traced back to a malvertising network and the Astrum exploit kit. The attacks against several universities, including University College London, emerged last week and initially there were fears that they were connected to the WannaCry ransomware outbreak. But researchers at…

An ISP in South Korea that was hit with a deep ransomware infection in recent days has agreed to pay more than $1 million to recover access to its encrypted data. The company, Nayana, said that it had been hit with the Erebus ransomware about 10 days ago, and spent several days trying to recover…