As Russia has tested every form of attack on Ukraine's civilians over the past decade, both digital and physical, it's often used winter as one of its weapons—launching cyberattacks on electric utilities to trigger December blackouts and ruthlessly bombing heating infrastructure. Now it appears Russia-based hackers last January tried yet …
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 »The US Supreme Court Kneecapped US Cyber Strategy
To protect America’s vital infrastructure from hackers without relying on a moribund Congress, the Biden administration bet big on creative uses of existing laws. But the Supreme Court probably blew up that approach. President Joe Biden’s strategy relied on agencies interpreting the laws that give them regulatory powers to include …
Read More »Spyware Users Exposed in Major Data Breach
In one of the largest-ever breaches of a US telecom giant, AT&T revealed this week that “nearly all” its customer phone and text records were stolen after hackers accessed its account on a third-party cloud service. That cloud service, Snowflake, has been linked to several recent breaches, including those of …
Read More »Hackers Leaking Taylor Swift Tickets? Don’t Get Your Hopes Up
Proton, the company behind Proton Mail, launched an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Docs, seeking to compete with the cloud giant on privacy. We broke down how Apple is taking a similar approach with its implementation of AI, using a system it calls Private Cloud Compute in its new Apple …
Read More »Google Is Piloting Face Recognition for Office Security
WIRED learned this week that Amazon Web Services investigated claims that the AI search startup Perplexity may have violated the cloud company's rules by appearing to pull data from websites that have attempted to shield themselves from such scraping. The news comes after WIRED published findings last week about the …
Read More »Red Tape Is Making Hospital Ransomware Attacks Worse
Crippling ransomware attacks against hospitals and health care providers are on the rise. These ruthless cyberattacks can take medical systems offline for weeks—canceling appointments and surgeries and causing harm to patients. Doctors and nurses are plunged into crisis situations where they resort to using pen and paper, while IT staff …
Read More »A Catastrophic Hospital Hack Ends in a Leak of 300M Patient Records
The rolling series of breaches targeting customers of cloud platform Snowflake appears to be a supply chain attack wrapped in another supply chain attack. A hacker who claims to have been involved in the attacks tells WIRED that the hackers, known as ShinyHunter, stole victims’ Snowflake credentials by first breaching …
Read More »Medical-Targeted Ransomware Is Breaking Records After Change Healthcare’s $22M Payout
When Change Healthcare paid $22 million in March to a ransomware gang that had crippled the company along with hundreds of hospitals, medical practices, and pharmacies across the US, the cybersecurity industry warned that Change's extortion payment would only fuel a vicious cycle: Rewarding hackers who had carried out a …
Read More »Ransomware Is ‘More Brutal’ Than Ever in 2024
Today, people around the world will head to school, doctor’s appointments, and pharmacies, only to be told, “Sorry, our computer systems are down.” The frequent culprit is a cybercrime gang operating on the other side of the world, demanding payment for system access or the safe return of stolen data. …
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