#Cybercrime

Californian Reyes Daniel Ruiz, who worked as a reliability engineer among other roles at Yahoo! from 2009 to 2018, abused his position by accessing Yahoo’s backend to steal “hashed” passwords, crack them and log into email accounts of women, including some coworkers.

On June 1, University of California San Francisco (UCSF) detected and subsequently stopped a cyber-attack, wherein threat actors obtained access to a part of the School of Medicine’s IT infrastructure. As part of the attack, the hackers encrypted a number of servers, making them temporarily inaccessible.

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has estimated that cybercriminals stole approximately $2 billion from victims by virtue of compromising corporate email accounts, in 2019. Criminals continued to invent new and more sophisticated types of attacks last year, although quite widespread extortion, government impersonation, and spoofing were the three crime categories newly added […]

A United States district court has released an indictment alleging Julian Assange, the founder of the online archive containing thousands of classified documents from government and corporate entities, WikiLeaks, of an attempt to recruit hackers from the LulzSec and Anonymous hacker groups to obtain sensitive information from government systems. Once stolen, the documents would appear […]

Threat actors are now targeting Google Analytics service to harvest data entered by users. As the victims are generally Europe and Americas-based online stores selling cosmetics, food products, digital equipment, and spare parts, the stolen information includes their shoppers’ credit card details.

North Korea has thousands of government-backed hackers trained to steal money and valuable information, disrupt infrastructure, and harass the ruling party’s targets, vice president for international security and diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute Daniel Russel told Business Insider.

Threat actors are now exploiting the Black Lives Matter campaign to distribute malware via email, which lures users to open an attached Microsoft Word file to “leave a review confidentially about Black Lives Matter.” The phishing emails’ subject line goes as “Vote anonymous about ‘Black Lives Matter.’”

The world isn’t the way I remember it, and certainly not the way I left it back when I was arrested in 2009 for installing botnets and commercial remote access programs on a handful of sensitive clinic systems, which included a critical SCADA system.

Cybercriminals have broken into the computer network of Westech International, the United States military contractor, that provides engineering and maintenance support for the Minuteman III nuclear deterrent. The hackers reportedly stole confidential documents from the company and now demand that it pay a ransom.

In 2009, Jesse William McGraw, aka “GhostExodus” and the leader of the so-called Electronik Tribulation Army (ETA) hacking group, broke into a dozen computers at the orthopedic W.B. Carrell Memorial Clinic, where he worked as a night-shift security guard.

According to the report by CipherTrace, in the first 5 months of 2020, the total losses of cryptocurrencies to criminals and scammers amounted to $1.36 billion. Researches suggest 2020 may bring the second-highest total crypto lost to crime ever observed, the current record being 2019’s $4.5 billion.

Looking through the news that came up during the month, one may notice several closely packed cases of hacking, extortion, and other unsavory activities involving Bitcoin. While there seems to be no particular connection between these cases, this is an unkind reminder not to be negligent about basic cybersecurity.