1.
Hacker steals money from bank and donates $11,000 to Anti-ISIS group: Sounds like a Robin Hood Hacker -
he hacked an unnamed bank and donated the money to Kurdish anti-ISIS Group. The
same hacker had breached Hacking Team last year. This is an example of a hacker
putting their skills to political use, while some have applauded his efforts,
others are not impressed with the tactics used to raise the funds.
2.
Schools pay ransom to recover data: In February - 53 schools in a US county discovered that they had been
hit by Ransomware. Even though the schools had backups, it figured that the
restoration effort of this size to remote servers can take weeks, and each day
the students and teachers do not have access to data -has a dollar value which
rapidly exceeds the cost of paying the ransom. Hence, the school district paid
the criminals nearly $10,000 to get the keys needed to decrypt their data. In Issue
61 - we had discussed about a new ransomware that targets schools &
hospitals. In Feb - A Hollywood
hospital had paid $17K as ransom.
3.
Hacker puts up 167 million LinkedIn passwords for sale: LinkedIn suffered a data breach in
2012, with what was believed to be 6.5 million user account passwords posted online.
However, four years later, the cyber-attack has come back to haunt LinkedIn with
hackers selling data belonging to 167 million users on the dark web. The passwords
were protected using the SHA1 algorithm which without salt made cracking the
information easy. After legal threats to the hacker search engine -
LeakedSource - it has chosen to remove the stolen data for the moment.
4.
1 Million computers hacked for making big money from Adsense: A group of
cyber criminals has infected as much as 1 Million computers around the world
over the past two years with a piece of malware that hijacks search results
pages using a local proxy. The malware drops JavaScript files that downloads
and implements a PAC file that hijacks all Web traffic, ensuring traffic routes
through an attacker-controlled server, where actual results are replaced with
fake Web pages. The goal is to help cyber-criminals earn money from the
Google's AdSense program.
5.
Ukrainian hacker admits stealing corporate press releases for $30
Million profit: A 28-year-old Ukrainian hacker has pleaded guilty in the
United States to stealing unpublished news releases and using that non-public
information in illegal trading to generate more than $30 Million in illicit
profits. These hackers would hack into the network of various PR companies to
access unpublished Press releases, study them and accordingly buy stocks of
those companies. In many cases the prices of the stocks they bought would move
up after the actual press release and these hackers would then sell their
stocks to make money.
6.
TeslaCrypt ransomware group pulls plug, releases decrypt key: The somewhat
surprising move last week by the operators of the TeslaCrypt ransomware sample,
to cease operations and publicly release the universal master decryption key
for it, is good news for victims of the malware. But the move, welcome as it
is, doesn't necessarily mean that the group won’t simply release another sample
or start afresh with a new malware campaign altogether, security researchers
warned. Andy Settle, head of special investigations at Forcepoint LLC, said it
could have been a matter of self-preservation.
7.
Leading antivirus security flaw exposes Linux, Mac and Windows: The antivirus
engine used in multiple Symantec products has an easy-to-exploit vulnerability
that could allow hackers to easily compromise Linux, Mac and Windows
computers. As Symantec is intercepting
system input and output, you only need to email a file -- the victim doesn't
even need to read the email, just the act of AV scanning it is a trigger. The
flaw was fixed last week via LiveUpdate.
8.
Cyber-attackers targeted Bangladesh official in $81m stealing spree: The cyber-attackers behind a successful
cyber-heist which left the Bangladesh central bank $81 million out of
pocket targeted the PC of a Bangladeshi official to conduct the theft.
According to Reuters, a Bangladesh diplomat admitted last week that a computer
belonging to a Bangladesh central bank official was targeted in the attack.
9.
Presidential campaigns hit by hackers: The current US presidential
candidates and their campaign sites have become the target of hackers.
Officials said motivation for these attacks range “from philosophical
differences to espionage,” with nation-state hackers going after candidates’
foreign policy details. Attacks against presidential campaigns are nothing new:
the 2008 and 2012 campaigns were hit hard by cyber-attacks as well.
10.
Good-Guy hacker finds flaw that could have drained $25B from an Indian bank: Exploiting a
vulnerable mobile application - a security researcher could have stolen as much
as $25 Billion from one of the India's biggest banks with the help of just a
few lines of code. Being a white hat hacker, he immediately reached out to the
bank and alerted it about the critical issues in its mobile app and helped the
bank fix them, instead of taking advantage of the security holes to steal money
from the bank that has about 25 Billion USD in Deposits.
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