Throughout June and August of this year, a sophisticated off-the-shelf malware campaign targeted over 300 organizations. According to cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, the campaign deployed SHAMOS, a malware variant of Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS) developed by cybercriminal group COOKIE SPIDER.
The UK government has announced its plans to invest in digital and artificial intelligence (AI) in public services, including the NHS, aiming to build strong technology foundations and tackle urgent cybersecurity risks.
The New Year has begun with further news of a particularly cynical fraud campaign aimed at jobseekers. Lucrative-seeming fake job offers are being sent by email to individuals working in targeted organizations and in companies operating in critical industries.
This month, cybersecurity company Crowdstrike has identified an email phishing campaign exploiting its recruitment branding to deliver malware disguised as an “employee CRM application.” The fake email impersonates Crowdstrike recruitment and directs recipients who are curious about the personalized job offer to a malicious website. But Crowdstrike also reports that the cybersecurity company is also aware of a number of other fake job offer scams currently taking place.
A second outage of several Microsoft services in two weeks, this one attributed to a cyber-attack, is fuelling further questions about the underlying security of the Windows operating system.
According to Microsoft: “While the initial trigger event was a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack… initial investigations suggest that an error in the implementation of our defenses amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it.”
Services affected included Outlook, Azure, and Microsoft 365, with some people complaining on social media that they were unable to work. Starbucks customers also reported issues with the Starbucks app in Boston, New York, Washington DC, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tampa and other cities. The disruption caused by this latest outage is, however, minor compared with the Windows outage caused by a mishandled CrowdStrike security upgrade, which resulted in canceled flights and marooned passengers in major international airports around the world last week.
The famous “blue screen of death,” witnessed with horror by 8.5 million Microsoft Windows users worldwide as a result of the ongoing CrowdStrike outage, may soon become a far more familiar sight across a wide range of sectors.
While there is no evidence that the widespread Microsoft Windows outage caused by the CrowdStrike upgrade was anything but accidental, many in the cybersecurity industry are seeing the past week’s experience as a dummy run for a full-fledged cyber-attack aimed at crippling critical infrastructure. As the current media pictures of people sleeping in airports testify, some sectors appear to be faring better than others.
Organized cybercriminal gangs have lost little time in attempting to cash in on the ongoing CrowdStrike/Windows outage currently affecting banks, airlines and businesses.
According to the UK’s National Security Cyber Centre: “An increase in phishing referencing this outage has already been observed, as opportunistic malicious actors seek to take advantage of the situation. This may be aimed at both organizations and individuals.”
IBM X-Force released a report, disclosing that ransomware attacks declined by 11.5% in 2023, compared to 2022.
IBM says the decline in ransomware attacks is largely due to the new cybercrime focus of infostealing tactics which rose by 32%. IBM X-Force’s report gathered data for the report based on 150 billion daily security events from 130 countries last year.
As part of Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” initiative, Google Chrome plans to test removing third-party cookies for 1% of its users by the end of 2024.
Going against the pleas of Google-focused advertisers, Google’s move to remove these third-party cookies used to track user data to build targeted advertiser profiles aims to enhance the web browser’s data privacy.
Samsung notified its customers in the UK that a recent data breach potentially exposed customer data, stemming from a third-party business application vulnerability.
Samsung UK further stated that the data affected only covers customers that purchased Samsung items in the UK online store, and ensured customers that the breach does not include passwords or financial data.
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