The United States, EU members and select other countries (some 40 in total) have reached a formal agreement to refuse ransomware payments demanded of government agencies. At present, this has no impact on private organizations or companies.
In a development that is certainly sparking discussions in CISO circles, SolarWinds and its head of information security are being charged with negligence in addressing known cybersecurity risks and fraudulent false reporting to inflate company stock value.
The massive MOVEit data breach is thought to have exposed some 62 million records in personal data to date, and over half a million emails from the Departments of Justice and Defense can now be added to that list.
Biden’s new executive order shows promise in tackling the multiple facets of harm AI could cause, but many elements are kicked down the road either for federal agencies to develop or for Congress to act on.
The cybersecurity workforce does continue to add substantial amounts of newcomers, about 5.5 million globally over the past year. The problem is that demand for new workers was at about 9 million.
What sets Octo Tempest apart from other cybercriminals is the highly advanced social engineering capability, something that ransomware gangs typically struggle with. The group’s current modus operandi is to target support and help desk employees.
Lloyd’s of London estimates that by the midpoint of the present century, there will be some sort of a cyber attack on a major payments system that causes rippling global damage to the tune of trillions of dollars. The current cyber insurance industry is sitting on no more than about $9 billion in total.
23andMe’s data breach has apparently gotten about four times worse, as four million more files have been leaked to a dark web hacking forum. It’s still not clear how many of these are full genetic profiles.
The company has disclosed exposure of customer files uploaded to the Okta support system. The security breach took place near the start of October and the window may have been open for most of the first half of the month.
Ragnar Locker’s dark web site is offline as nine servers were taken during law enforcement raids in Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. A 35 year old Czech man was arrested following the seizure.