News

Data breach incident management and recovery

• January 29, 2021 29 Jan'21

  Human factor dominates Australia’s latest data breach numbers

  The number of data breaches resulting from human error increased by 18% in the second half of 2020, according to Australian government’s latest notifiable data breaches report

• January 28, 2021 28 Jan'21

  End of Emotet: A blow to cyber crime, but don’t drop your guard

  The takedown of Emotet is a huge event with repercussions that will reverberate across the cyber criminal world, but unfortunately that’s not to say there will be much of a long-term impact

• January 27, 2021 27 Jan'21

  Mimecast breach was work of SolarWinds attackers

  Mimecast’s investigation into a January 2021 breach of its systems turns up evidence that the culprit was the same group that targeted SolarWinds in December

• January 27, 2021 27 Jan'21

  Emotet botnet goes offline as cops seize servers

  The Emotet botnet has been disrupted and knocked offline after a major international effort by law enforcement

• January 27, 2021 27 Jan'21

  Grindr complaint results in €9.6m GDPR fine

  Norway’s data protection authority plans to apply a fine totalling 10% of LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr’s revenues over its data sharing practices

• January 26, 2021 26 Jan'21

  Conservatives broke data law to racially profile millions

  The Conservative Party acted illegally in collecting data that inferred voters’ ethnicity and religious background, a Select Committee has heard

• January 26, 2021 26 Jan'21

  North Korean state attacks legitimate security researchers

  Threat researchers specialising in vulnerability research and development appear to be being targeted by a North Korean state-backed group

• January 26, 2021 26 Jan'21

  ICO extends commissioner Denham’s term of office

  Extension of Elizabeth Denham’s tenure as information commissioner will give the government more time to appoint her successor

• January 22, 2021 22 Jan'21

  Sepa data leaks as agency resists ransom demands

  The Scottish Environment Protection Agency is resisting extortion demands from a ransomware gang, but has suffered a data leak in retaliation

• January 21, 2021 21 Jan'21

  Hackney Council tenders for cyber security upgrade

  Suppliers are being invited to tender for enhanced cyber security capabilities at ransomware victim Hackney Council

• January 21, 2021 21 Jan'21

  Gamarue malware found on government-issued school laptops

  Devices handed out by the government to support vulnerable children contain malware that appears to be contacting C2 infrastructure in Russia

• January 21, 2021 21 Jan'21

  Incompetent cyber criminals leak data in opsec failure

  Even cyber criminals need to pay attention to their information security posture, as this cautionary tale uncovered by Check Point reveals

• January 20, 2021 20 Jan'21

  Should I be worried about MFA-bypassing pass-the-cookie attacks?

  Malicious actors bypassed multi-factor authentication using so-called pass-the-cookie attacks, but how worrying is this and what is the risk to organisations?

• January 19, 2021 19 Jan'21

  Questions raised by New Zealand central bank boss, following cyber attack investigation

  The governor of New Zealand’s central bank said the organisation must answer questions about its security following a ‘significant’ attack

• January 19, 2021 19 Jan'21

  Value of GDPR fines shows dramatic increase in 2020

  European regulators imposed almost €160m worth of fines during the past 12 months, a substantial rise

• January 19, 2021 19 Jan'21

  Criminals fiddled stolen Covid-19 vaccine data to damage trust

  Malicious actors manipulated stolen Covid-19 data in a way clearly intended to damage public trust in vaccines, says the EMA

• January 19, 2021 19 Jan'21

  MAS offers guidance on mitigating supply chain threats

  Monetary Authority of Singapore revises its technology risk management guidelines to help the financial sector guard against supply chain attacks

• January 18, 2021 18 Jan'21

  Australians lost A$176m to scams in 2020

  Investment scams topped the list of scams, which grew by 23.1% in 2020 as criminals exploited human psychology using social engineering

• January 15, 2021 15 Jan'21

  US cyber security agencies get $9bn in Biden plan

  New funding proposals come as US government reels from the impact of the December 2020 SolarWinds attack

• January 14, 2021 14 Jan'21

  Old, on-premise systems targeted in Hackney ransomware attack

  Council reveals some more insight into how the Pysa ransomware gang infiltrated its systems by exploiting legacy technology

• January 14, 2021 14 Jan'21

  Unforeseen consequences of new technologies put UK at risk

  Lords committee told that the risks associated with various emerging digital technologies must be assessed together, with input from UK citizens, if the government is to avoid ‘siloisation’ of fundamentally interconnected problems

• January 14, 2021 14 Jan'21

  APAC firms grapple with cyber security amid pandemic

  Some aspects of cyber security have taken a backseat as companies across the Asia-Pacific region rush to shore up their infrastructure to cope with the demands of remote work

• January 13, 2021 13 Jan'21

  World’s largest dark web market disrupted in major police operation

  Coordinated international operation including Europol and the UK’s National Crime Agency has successfully taken DarkMarket offline

• January 13, 2021 13 Jan'21

  Stolen Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine data leaked

  Data dump understood to include screenshots of emails, peer review information, PDFs and PowerPoint presentations

• January 12, 2021 12 Jan'21

  Mimecast latest security firm to be compromised

  Users of a specific Mimecast certificate used to authenticate services to Microsoft Office 365 may be at risk of compromise in an attack that may relate to the ongoing SolarWinds incident

• January 12, 2021 12 Jan'21

  Parler collapse opens door to phishing attacks

  The shutdown of controversial social media site Parler, and the publication of huge amounts of user data scraped by ethical hackers, is giving cyber crime experts cause for concern

• January 11, 2021 11 Jan'21

  Kaspersky claims link between Solorigate and Kazuar backdoors

  Researchers say they have found specific code similarities between the Solorigate/Sunburst malware and the Kazuar backdoor, suggesting some relationship

• January 11, 2021 11 Jan'21

  New Zealand central bank IT system breached in cyber attack

  Bank is responding to a cyber attack after hackers breached the system of a third-party supplier

• January 08, 2021 08 Jan'21

  Which? online banking investigation reveals ‘worrying gaps’ in security

  Consumer rights organisation has ranked the security of UK online current account providers

• January 07, 2021 07 Jan'21

  Hackney Council data leaked by Pysa ransomware gang

  Council data stolen in October is leaked online in a double extortion attack

• January 06, 2021 06 Jan'21

  SolarWinds attack almost certainly work of Russian spooks

  Investigations into the far-reaching SolarWinds Solorigate attack did not let up during the holidays

• January 05, 2021 05 Jan'21

  Scammers impersonating the ACSC on the prowl

  The Australian Cyber Security Centre warns of scammers who are using its name to gain control of personal computers and trick users into revealing personal information

• December 31, 2020 31 Dec'20

  Top 10 investigations and national security stories of 2020

  Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 investigations and national security stories of 2020

• December 24, 2020 24 Dec'20

  Top 10 cyber crime stories of 2020

  Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 cyber crime stories of 2020

• December 23, 2020 23 Dec'20

  Top 10 cyber security stories of 2020

  Here are Computer Weekly’s 10 top cyber security stories of 2020

• December 22, 2020 22 Dec'20

  Ministry of Justice in the dock for catalogue of serious data breaches

  Annual report reveals major incidents of personal data loss affecting 121,355 people and including misplaced, unencrypted USB stick containing documents from a trial, accidental disclosure of identities, and staff files made visible to ...

• December 18, 2020 18 Dec'20

  Finnish government tables laws to protect data from cyber criminals

  Government is strengthening its legal framework to protect data from hackers in the wake of a massive breach at a psychotherapy centre

• December 18, 2020 18 Dec'20

  Utility supplier People’s Energy has entire customer list stolen

  All 270,000 customers of People’s Energy, a renewable energy startup, have had their details compromised in a major data breach incident

• December 18, 2020 18 Dec'20

  SolarWinds cyber attack is ‘grave risk’ to global security

  More victims of the SolarWinds Orion Sunburst cyber attack are being identified as the massive scale of the Russia-linked cyber espionage campaign becomes more clear

• December 17, 2020 17 Dec'20

  EU security strategy a ‘step up’ on cyber leadership, says Brussels

  The EU’s new cyber security strategy forms a key component of Shaping Europe’s Digital Future, the Recovery Plan for Europe, and the EU Security Union Strategy

• December 17, 2020 17 Dec'20

  FireEye and partners release SolarWinds kill-switch

  A so-called kill-switch for the dangerous SolarWinds Sunburst attack should allay some user fears, but is not a full fix for the issue

• December 15, 2020 15 Dec'20

  SolarWinds cyber attack: How worried should I be, and what do I do now?

  Security teams across the world are on high alert as more details emerge of the widespread SolarWinds ‘Sunburst’ attack. What do defenders need to do next?

• December 15, 2020 15 Dec'20

  Cyber crime victims in the Netherlands not reporting offences

  Dutch victims of online crime rarely report it to the police and when they do, they are often dissatisfied

• December 14, 2020 14 Dec'20

  FireEye identifies flaw in networking monitoring software as US agencies attacked

  Cyber security company says investigations have revealed security breach occurred because of a flaw in a network monitoring software

• December 11, 2020 11 Dec'20

  The week in ransomware: Foxconn and Randstad are high-profile victims

  Foxconn and Randstad are laid low by cyber criminals, while Sophos spills on Egregor, and prognosticators turn to their crystal balls to divine how ransomware will develop in the next 12 months

• December 11, 2020 11 Dec'20

  Disputed PostgreSQL bug exploited in cryptomining botnet

  PGMiner cryptomining botnet remained unnoticed by exploiting a disputed CVE in PostgreSQL

• December 11, 2020 11 Dec'20

  Surge in Covid-19 vaccine phishing scams reported

  Check Point and KnowBe4 share details of a growing number of phishing campaigns using the prospect of a Covid-19 vaccine as a lure

• December 10, 2020 10 Dec'20

  After critical year, Vodafone trains security sights on CNI market

  Vodafone’s security head Steve Knibbs explains how he plans to bring the lessons of a transformative few years in cyber security to bear on new markets

• December 10, 2020 10 Dec'20

  Data on Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine stolen in cyber attack

  The European Medicines Agency has launched a full investigation into an apparent security incident that has seen documents on the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine stolen

• December 09, 2020 09 Dec'20

  FireEye’s ethical hacking tools stolen in state-backed attack

  Hacking tools used to conduct red team penetration testing were stolen in the state-backed attack on security firm FireEye