Articles about Cyber attack

The Information Commissioner's Office, the UK’s independent regulator for data protection and information rights, says more than half of cyber attacks and data breaches in schools and colleges in the past three years were carried out by pupils.

Of the 215 hacks and breaches in educational establishments investigated by the ICO in that period, 57 percent of them were perpetrated by students.

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The DDoS cyber-attack currently targeting the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine has entered its third day, causing intermittent disruptions in service. The nonprofit research library is best known for housing millions of historical documents, preserved websites, and media content.

The ongoing intrusion has involved the launch of tens of thousands of fake information requests per second, though the source of the attack remains unknown.

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Security researchers at Palo Alto Networks have uncovered a new variant of the notorious Bifrost malware, now targeting Linux systems with a cunning twist. This latest iteration employs a deceptive domain, download.vmfare[.]com, to masquerade as a legitimate VMware site, thereby bypassing security measures and compromising unsuspecting users.

Bifrost, a remote access Trojan (RAT) first identified in 2004, has been a persistent threat, enabling attackers to pilfer sensitive information such as hostnames and IP addresses. The recent surge in Linux variants of Bifrost has sent ripples of concern through the cybersecurity community, signaling a potential uptick in attacks on Linux-based systems.

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Cyberattacks are forcing the majority of companies to pay ransoms and break their 'do not pay' policies, with data recovery deficiencies compounding the problem.

New research from Cohesity, based on responses from over 900 IT and security decision-makers, shows that companies firmly operate in a 'when,' not 'if,' reality of cyberattacks.

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Cyberattacks are on the rise across all industries, but the history of the public sector’s weaker protections makes it an increasingly attractive target for cybercriminals with costly consequences. IBM asserts the toll of each cybersecurity incident in the public sector averages a substantial $2.6 million. In addition, according to the 2023 Verizon DBIR, Public Administration was the leader in the total number of incidents and the total number of breaches last year.

Cyberattacks can have detrimental impacts on government agencies and officials. Municipal services such as water supply, emergency services, public transportation and waste management rely heavily on interconnected digital systems. Cyberattacks like ransomware can disrupt these services, causing inconvenience and potential safety issues for residents.

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In total, 86 percent of all cyber threats, including malware, ransomware, and phishing attacks, are delivered over encrypted channels, according to a new report.

The study from Zscaler also shows threats over HTTPS grew by 24 percent from 2022, underscoring the sophisticated nature of cybercriminal tactics that target encrypted channels.

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The news last month of yet another cyberattack on MGM Resorts, initiating a system shutdown and disrupting its operations, is yet another in a very long list of attacks that we have witnessed in the past couple of years.  Having the right preventive and defensive cybersecurity measures in place for such attacks is a given, and it is what most organizations focus on. But it is also about understanding how the organization will recover from an incident and how they can limit the extent of an attack. 

Today, being impacted by a cyberattack is almost inevitable. The global average cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.45 million, a 15 percent increase over 3 years, according to IBM. Therefore, companies also need to think about how they can proactively recover, how quickly they can recover, and the cost of recovery to the business.

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