data breach | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity in healthcare has never been more urgent. As the most vulnerable industry and largest target for cybercriminals, healthcare is facing an increasing wave of cyberattacks. When a hospital's systems are held hostage by ransomware, it's not just data at risk — it's the care of patients who depend on life-saving treatments. Imagine an attack that forces emergency care to halt, surgeries to be postponed, or a cancer patient's private health information used for extortion. This is the reality healthcare faces as cybercriminals exploit people who need care. Healthcare accounted for 17.8% of all breach events and 18.2% of destructive ransomware events since 2012 1 , surpassing other sectors like finance, government, and education. This alarming rise in attacks makes one thing clear: poor cybersecurity hygiene is the root cause, and the consequences for failing to address these vulnerabilities are devastating. Organizations that neglect basic cybersecurity practices, like sof

British authorities on Thursday announced the arrest of a 17-year-old male in connection with a cyber attack affecting Transport for London (TfL). "The 17-year-old male was detained on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offenses in relation to the attack, which was launched on TfL on 1 September," the U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) said . The teenager, who's from Walsall, is said to have been arrested on September 5, 2024, following an investigation that was launched in the incident's aftermath. The law enforcement agency said the unnamed individual was questioned and subsequently let go on bail. "Attacks on public infrastructure such as this can be hugely disruptive and lead to severe consequences for local communities and national systems," Deputy Director Paul Foster, head of the NCA's National Cyber Crime Unit, said. "The swift response by TfL following the incident has enabled us to act quickly, and we are grateful for their continued co

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

Cato CTRL (Cyber Threats Research Lab) has released its Q2 2024 Cato CTRL SASE Threat Report . The report highlights critical findings based on the analysis of a staggering 1.38 trillion network flows from more than 2,500 of Cato's global customers, between April and June 2024. Key Insights from the Q2 2024 Cato CTRL SASE Threat Report The report is packed with unique insights that are based on thorough data analysis of network flows. The top three insights for enterprises are as follows. 1) IntelBroker: A Persistent Threat Actor in the Cyber Underground During an in-depth investigation into hacking communities and the dark web, Cato CTRL identified a notorious threat actor known as IntelBroker. IntelBroker is a prominent figure and moderator within the BreachForums hacking community and has been actively involved in the sale of data and source code from major organizations. These include AMD, Apple, Facebook, KrypC, Microsoft, Space-Eyes, T-Mobile and the US Army Aviation and Mi

The operators of the mysterious Quad7 botnet are actively evolving by compromising several brands of SOHO routers and VPN appliances by leveraging a combination of both known and unknown security flaws. Targets include devices from TP-LINK, Zyxel, Asus, Axentra, D-Link, and NETGEAR, according to a new report by French cybersecurity company Sekoia. "The Quad7 botnet operators appear to be evolving their toolset, introducing a new backdoor and exploring new protocols, with the aim of enhancing stealth and evading the tracking capabilities of their operational relay boxes (ORBs)," researchers Felix Aimé, Pierre-Antoine D., and Charles M. said .  Quad7, also called 7777, was first publicly documented by independent researcher Gi7w0rm in October 2023, highlighting the activity cluster's pattern of ensnaring TP-Link routers and Dahua digital video recorders (DVRs) into a botnet. The botnet, which gets its name from the fact it opens TCP port 7777 on compromised devices,

A "simplified Chinese-speaking actor" has been linked to a new campaign that has targeted multiple countries in Asia and Europe with the end goal of performing search engine optimization (SEO) rank manipulation. The black hat SEO cluster has been codenamed DragonRank by Cisco Talos, with victimology footprint scattered across Thailand, India, Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, and China. "DragonRank exploits targets' web application services to deploy a web shell and utilizes it to collect system information and launch malware such as PlugX and BadIIS, running various credential-harvesting utilities," security researcher Joey Chen said . The attacks have led to compromises of 35 Internet Information Services ( IIS ) servers with the end goal of deploying the BadIIS malware, which was first documented by ESET in August 2021. It's specifically designed to facilitate proxy ware and SEO fraud by turning the compromised IIS server into a relay point for mal

Imagine a world where you never have to remember another password. Seems like a dream come true for both end users and IT teams, right? But as the old saying goes, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."  If your organization is like many, you may be contemplating a move to passwordless authentication. But the reality is that a passwordless security approach comes with its own set of pitfalls and perils. In this post, we'll discuss the real-world complexity of going passwordless and explore why strengthening your existing password protocols may be the simpler solution.  The appeal of passwordless authentication Password-related vulnerabilities pose a major threat to organizational security. According to research by  LastPass , a full 80% of data breaches stem from weak, reused, or compromised passwords. This sobering statistic highlights the appeal of passwordless systems, which offer a way to completely circumvent the risks associated with traditional passwor

A trio of threat activity clusters linked to China has been observed compromising more government organizations in Southeast Asia as part of a renewed state-sponsored operation codenamed Crimson Palace , indicating an expansion in the scope of the espionage effort. Cybersecurity firm Sophos, which has been monitoring the cyber offensive, said it comprises three intrusion sets tracked as Cluster Alpha (STAC1248), Cluster Bravo (STAC1870), and Cluster Charlie (STAC1305). STAC is an abbreviation for "security threat activity cluster." "The attackers consistently used other compromised organizational and public service networks in that region to deliver malware and tools under the guise of a trusted access point," security researchers Mark Parsons, Morgan Demboski, and Sean Gallagher said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. A noteworthy aspect of the attacks is that it entails the use of an unnamed organization's systems as a command-and-control

Mobile users in Brazil are the target of a new malware campaign that delivers a new Android banking trojan named Rocinante. "This malware family is capable of performing keylogging using the Accessibility Service, and is also able to steal PII from its victims using phishing screens posing as different banks," Dutch security company ThreatFabric said . "Finally, it can use all this exfiltrated information to perform device takeover (DTO) of the device, by leveraging the accessibility service privileges to achieve full remote access on the infected device." Some of the prominent targets of the malware include financial institutions such as Itaú Shop, Santander, with the phony apps masquerading as Bradesco Prime and Correios Celular, among others - Livelo Pontos (com.resgatelivelo.cash) Correios Recarga (com.correiosrecarga.android) Bradesco Prime (com.resgatelivelo.cash) Módulo de Segurança (com.viberotion1414.app) Source code analysis of the malware has

In the digital realm, secrets (API keys, private keys, username and password combos, etc.) are the keys to the kingdom. But what if those keys were accidentally left out in the open in the very tools we use to collaborate every day? A Single Secret Can Wreak Havoc Imagine this: It's a typical Tuesday in June 2024. Your dev team is knee-deep in sprints, Jira tickets are flying, and Slack is buzzing with the usual mix of cat memes and code snippets. Little do you know, buried in this digital chatter is a ticking time bomb – a plaintext credential that gives unfettered access to your company's crown jewels. Fast forward a few weeks, and you're in the middle of a CISO's worst nightmare. Terabytes of customer data, including millions of bank account details, have been exfiltrated. Your company is splashed across headlines, and new incidents are surfacing daily. The culprit? A secret inadvertently shared in a Jira comment. This isn't a far-fetched scenario. It happen

Eight vulnerabilities have been uncovered in Microsoft applications for macOS that an adversary could exploit to gain elevated privileges or access sensitive data by circumventing the operating system's permissions-based model, which revolves around the Transparency, Consent, and Control ( TCC ) framework. "If successful, the adversary could gain any privileges already granted to the affected Microsoft applications," Cisco Talos said . "For example, the attacker could send emails from the user account without the user noticing, record audio clips, take pictures, or record videos without any user interaction." The shortcomings span various applications such as Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel PowerPoint, and OneNote. The cybersecurity company said malicious libraries could be injected into these applications and gain their entitlements and user-granted permissions, which could then be weaponized for extracting sensitive information depending on the access granted

A 57-year-old man from the U.S. state of Missouri has been arrested in connection with a failed data extortion campaign that targeted his former employer. Daniel Rhyne of Kansas City, Missouri, has been charged with one count of extortion in relation to a threat to cause damage to a protected computer, one count of intentional damage to a protected computer, and one count of wire fraud. He was arrested in the state on August 27, 2024, following an attempt to extort an unnamed industrial company that's headquartered in Somerset County, New Jersey, where he was employed as a core infrastructure engineer. Per court documents, some employees of the company are said to have received an extortion email that warned all of its IT administrators had been locked out or removed from the network, data backups had been deleted, and an additional 40 servers would be shut down each day over the next 10 days if a ransom of 20 bitcoin, then valued at $750,000, wasn't paid. "The inves

Threat actors linked to the RansomHub ransomware group encrypted and exfiltrated data from at least 210 victims since its inception in February 2024, the U.S. government said. The victims span various sectors, including water and wastewater, information technology, government services and facilities, healthcare and public health, emergency services, food and agriculture, financial services, commercial facilities, critical manufacturing, transportation, and communications critical infrastructure. "RansomHub is a ransomware-as-a-service variant—formerly known as Cyclops and Knight—that has established itself as an efficient and successful service model (recently attracting high-profile affiliates from other prominent variants such as LockBit and ALPHV)," government agencies said . A ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) platform that's a descendant of Cyclops and Knight, the e-crime operation has attracted high-profile affiliates from other prominent variants such as LockBit

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new QR code phishing (aka quishing) campaign that leverages Microsoft Sway infrastructure to host fake pages, once again highlighting the abuse of legitimate cloud offerings for malicious purposes. "By using legitimate cloud applications, attackers provide credibility to victims, helping them to trust the content it serves," Netskope Threat Labs researcher Jan Michael Alcantara said . "Additionally, a victim uses their Microsoft 365 account that they're already logged-into when they open a Sway page, that can help persuade them about its legitimacy as well. Sway can also be shared through either a link (URL link or visual link) or embedded on a website using an iframe." The attacks have primarily singled out users in Asia and North America, with technology, manufacturing, and finance sectors being the most sought-after sectors. Microsoft Sway is a cloud-based tool for creating newsletters, presentations

Nowadays, sensitive and critical data is traveling in everyday business channels that offer only the basic level of security and encryption, and companies are often oblivious to the risk. A case in point: Disney suffered a devastating data leak by a hacktivist group known as NullBulge that got hold of over 1.2 terabytes of data from Disney's internal Slack messaging channels. The breach exposed sensitive information, including: details about unreleased projects, computer code, login details and passwords, and Intellectual Property (IP) and corporate secrets. Slack breaches have also impacted companies like Uber, Rockstar, and Electronic Arts (EA). Cisco Webex used by the German Bundeswehr leaked data from hundreds of meetings, some classified. Outlook was breached by Chinese hackers last year. We have nothing against any of the tools above. They are all great collaboration tools. However, just like companies don't allow developers to use just any old tool to push code to p