Vulnerability Note

In the last two weeks, Florida has paid more than $1.1 million in bitcoin to cybercriminals to recover encrypted files from two separate ransomware attacks—one against  Riviera Beach  and the other against  Lake City . Lake City, a city in northern Florida, agreed on Monday to pay hackers 42 Bitcoin (equivalent to $573,300 at the current value) to unlock phone and email systems following a ransomware attack that crippled its computer systems for two weeks. The ransomware attack, dubbed "Triple Threat" since it combines three different methods of attack to target network systems, infected Lake City systems on June 10 after an employee in city hall opened a malicious email. Though the IT staff disconnected computers within just 10 minutes of the cyber attack starting, it was too late. The attack locked down the city workers' email accounts and servers. ince the police and fire departments operate on a different server, they were the only ones not impacted by the attack

Yesterday, some residents of Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa, were left without electricity after the city's power company got attacked by a ransomware virus. City Power, the company responsible for powering South Africa's financial capital Johannesburg,  confirmed  Thursday on Twitter that it had been hit by a Ransomware virus that had encrypted all of its databases, applications, and network. The attack prevented prepaid customers from buying electricity units, upload invoices when making payments, or access the City Power's official website, eventually leaving them without power. "Please note that the virus hit us early Thursday morning, compromising our database and other software, impacting most of our applications and networks," the city government said in a  tweet . However, the company has also ensured its customers that none of their details were compromised in the cyber attack. At the time of writing, the company confirmed they have r

The Israel Defense Force (IDF) claims to have neutralized an "attempted" cyber attack by launching airstrikes on a building in Gaza Strip from where it says the attack was originated. As shown in a  video  tweeted by IDF, the building in the Gaza Strip, which Israeli fighter drones have now destroyed, was reportedly the headquarters for Palestinian Hamas military intelligence, from where a cyber unit of hackers was allegedly trying to penetrate Israel's cyberspace. "We thwarted an attempted Hamas cyber offensive against Israeli targets. Following our successful cyber defensive operation, we targeted a building where the Hamas cyber operatives work. HamasCyberHQ.exe has been removed,"  said  the Israeli Defence Forces on Twitter. However, the Israel Defense Force has not shared any information about the attempted cyber attack by the Hamas group, saying it would reveal the country's cyber capabilities. According to Judah Ari Gross of  Times of Israel , th

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI have issued another joint alert about a new piece of malware that the prolific North Korean APT hacking group Hidden Cobra has actively been using in the wild. Hidden Cobra, also known as Lazarus Group and Guardians of Peace, is believed to be backed by North Korean government and known to launch cyber attacks against media organizations, aerospace, financial and critical infrastructure sectors across the world. The hacking group was the same associated with the  2017 WannaCry ransomware menace , the  2014 Sony Pictures hack , and the  SWIFT Banking attack  in 2016. Cobra hackers have been using for secretly tunneling traffic out of compromised computer systems. The malware implements a custom protocol configured with a proxy server/port and proxy username and password, allowing hackers to bypass the compromised system's required authentication to reach outside of the network. The ElectricFish malware is a command-line

Important Update (21 June 2019) ➤  The Tor Project on Friday released second update ( Tor Browser 8.5.3 ) for its privacy web-browser that patches the another Firefox zero-day vulnerability patched this week. Following the latest critical update for Firefox, the Tor Project today released an updated version of its anonymity and privacy browser to patch the same Firefox vulnerability in its bundle. Earlier this week, Mozilla released Firefox 67.0.3 and Firefox ESR 60.7.1 versions to patch a critical actively-exploited vulnerability ( CVE-2019-11707 ) that could allow attackers to remotely take full control over systems running the vulnerable browser versions. Besides updating Firefox, the latest  Tor Browser 8.5.2  for desktops also includes updated NoScript version 10.6.3 that fixes a few known issues. According to the Tor Project Team, if you are already using Tor browser with "safer" and "safest" security levels, the flaw doesn't affect you. For some reas

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today officially confirmed that Facebook has agreed to pay a  record-breaking $5 billion fine  over privacy violations surrounding the  Cambridge Analytica scandal . Besides the multibillion-dollar penalty, the company has also accepted a 20-year-long agreement that enforces it to implement a new organizational framework designed to strengthen its data privacy practices and policies. The agreement requires Facebook to make some major structural changes, as explained below, that will hold the company accountable for the decisions it makes about its users' privacy and information it collects on them. "The order requires Facebook to restructure its approach to privacy from the corporate board-level down, and establishes strong new mechanisms to ensure that Facebook executives are accountable for the decisions they make about privacy and that those decisions are subject to meaningful oversight," the FTC said in a  press release . Accor