The week was dominated by news that thousands of pagers, walkie-talkies and other devices were exploding across Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday in an attack targeting the militant group Hezbollah. At least 32 people were killed, including at least four children, and more than 3,200 people were injured. The covert …
Read More »The Feds Say These Are the Russian Hackers Who Attacked US Water Utilities
The week was particularly chock-full of dramatic security news. On Friday, a flawed update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform caused massive global service outages and disruptions around the world. The issue, which only impacted Windows computers, crashed PCs and servers, disrupting air travel, hospitals, banks, universities, and more. Earlier in the …
Read More »Hackers Claim to Have Leaked 1.1 TB of Disney Slack Messages
A group calling itself “NullBulge” published a 1.1-TB trove of data late last week that it claims is a dump of Disney's internal Slack archive. The data allegedly includes every message and file from nearly 10,000 channels, including unreleased projects, code, images, login credentials, and links to internal websites and …
Read More »Notorious Hacker Kingpin ‘Tank’ Is Finally Going to Prison
For more than a decade, Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov—a Ukrainian who used the online hacker name “Tank”—managed to evade cops. When FBI and Ukrainian officials raided his Donetsk apartment in 2010, the place was deserted and Penchukov had vanished. But the criminal spree came to a juddering halt at the end …
Read More »Hackers Detail How They Allegedly Stole Ticketmaster Data From Snowflake
Hackers who stole terabytes of data from Ticketmaster and other customers of the cloud storage firm Snowflake claim they obtained access to some of the Snowflake accounts by first breaching a Belarusian-founded contractor that works with those customers. About 165 customer accounts were potentially affected in the recent hacking campaign …
Read More »The White House Reveals New Master Plan to Stop Everything From Cyberattacks to Terrorism
The Biden administration is updating the US government’s blueprint for protecting the country’s most important infrastructure from hackers, terrorists, and natural disasters. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden signed a national security memorandum overhauling a 2013 directive that lays out how agencies work together, with private companies, and with state and …
Read More »Hackers Linked to Russia’s Military Claim Credit for Sabotaging US Water Utilities
Russia's military intelligence unit known as Sandworm has, for the past decade, served as the Kremlin’s most aggressive cyberattack force, triggering blackouts in Ukraine and releasing self-spreading, destructive code in incidents that remain some of the most disruptive hacking events in history. In recent months, however, one group of hackers …
Read More »Change Healthcare’s New Ransomware Nightmare Goes From Bad to Worse
Change Healthcare is facing a new cybersecurity nightmare after a ransomware group began selling what it claims is Americans’ sensitive medical and financial records stolen from the health care giant. “For most US individuals out there doubting us, we probably have your personal data,” the RansomHub gang said in an …
Read More »A Vigilante Hacker Took Down North Korea’s Internet. Now He’s Taking Off His Mask
A little over two years have passed since the online vigilante who would call himself P4x fired the first shot in his own one-man cyberwar. Working alone in his coastal Florida home in late January of 2022, wearing slippers and pajama pants and periodically munching on Takis corn snacks, he …
Read More »The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind
The scourge of software supply chain attacks—an increasingly common hacking technique that hides malicious code in a widely used legitimate program—can take many forms. Hackers can penetrate an update server to seed out their malware, or even break into the network where the software was developed to corrupt it at …
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