Cyber security

The Finnish government said today that the telephones of some of its foreign diplomats were infected last year with Pegasus, a spyware strain developed by controversial Israeli surveillance vendor NSO Group. Finland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the hacks were discovered in the autumn and winter of 2021–2022 and that the espionage campaign is no […]

A threat actor has used an exploit to steal approximately $80 million from Qubit Finance, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that allows users to loan and speculate on cryptocurrency price variations. The hack took place late last night, on January 27, and was formally acknowledged by the platform within hours. According to an incident report of the hack, […]

More than 3,600 network-attached storage (NAS) devices from Taiwanese company QNAP have been infected and had their data encrypted by a new strain of ransomware named Deadbolt. Devices attacked by the Deadbolt gang are easy to recognize because the login screen is typically replaced with a ransom note, and local files are encrypted and renamed […]

US-based exploit broker Zerodium announced plans today to pay $200,000 and $400,000 for zero-day exploits in Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook, respectively, two of today’s most popular and widely used desktop email clients. The company, which buys exploits from security researchers and sells them to government and law enforcement agencies, announced its intentions earlier today […]

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) announced on Wednesday that it had partnered with tech giants including Microsoft, Intel, and Adobe to launch a new standard aimed at impeding the rapid spread of deepfakes. The first-of-its-kind specification grants content creators a means to develop what the organization calls “tamper-evident” media. It will work […]

The Biden administration on Thursday will kick off an effort to protect the country’s water sector from cyberattacks, the latest attempt by the federal government to strengthen the digital defenses of the nation’s critical infrastructure. The administration will formally extend President Joe Biden’s “Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity Initiative” — which was established last year and […]

The Conti ransomware gang has been linked to an attack on Delta Electronics, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturing company and a major supplier of power components to companies like Apple and Tesla. The attack took place last Friday, on January 21, according to a statement shared by the company with stock market authorities. The company said the attack […]

One of the two administrators of the DeepDotWeb portal was sentenced this week to 97 months in prison for receiving money from illegal dark web marketplaces to promote their sites. Tal Prihar, 37, was detained in May 2019 in France and subsequently extradited to the US. He was charged with running DeepDotWeb, a website on the public […]

The Ukrainian government said today that it found evidence meant to connect the data wiping attack that hit its own systems two weeks ago to a pro-Ukrainian hacking group in what security researchers typically describe as a “false flag” meant to distract investigators from the real culprits of the attack. To better understand what the […]

Meta Connectivity (previously Facebook Connectivity) is facing scrutiny after reports emerged that their Free Basics program, which provides consumers in developing countries with free access to particular sites including Facebook, has been charging its users without their knowledge.  Free Basics launched in 2013 in collaboration with a variety of different cellular providers to better connect […]