Cybersecurity

Microsoft has been continuing to warn that the U.S. is vulnerable to cyberattacks from China — yet has still maintained closed ties to Chinese government research institutes that could serve as the training grounds for the communist country’s army of hackers.

John Dwyer, research director for cybersecurity firm Binary Defense, said in an interview on Wednesday that Chinese state-sponsored hackers were able to infiltrate the network of a U.S.-based global engineering firm and linger for months before they were discovered.

Ali Akbar Ahmadian, secretary-general of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) of Iran, on Wednesday called for the China-dominated BRICS economic group to create “a new security structure in the international arena to help the order and security of the future world.”

Poland´s security officials said they foiled cyberattacks and online blackmail attempts by groups acting for Russian and Belarusian services.

Flights were grounded, civil servants were locked out of their computers and police officers resorted to texting one another in the Netherlands on Wednesday as a network outage at the Ministry of Defense.

The FBI, ODNI, and CISA stated that hackers linked to the Iranian government were responsible for attacking the Trump campaign.

A security researcher’s mission to investigate a wave of fraudulent text messages impersonating the United States Postal Service (USPS) has uncovered a massive “smishing” operation, hacking into fraudsters’ systems after they tried to trick him with a bogus package delivery message.

Democrats and Republicans in Georgia have found common ground and are demanding the state election board ditch electronic voting machines.

KnowBe4, a prominent cybersecurity firm, recently uncovered a sophisticated infiltration attempt by a North Korean “threat actor” who posed as a remote software engineer on their internal IT team. The North Korean spy, after being hired, immediately began uploading malware to the company’s systems.

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that broke the internet, has released a comprehensive post-incident review (PIR) detailing the cause of last week’s widespread Windows crash that affected 8.5 million machines and outlining steps to prevent future occurrences. The company is so repentant they are sending certain users $10 Uber Eats gift cards as an apology. 

Cybersecurity start-up Wiz has turned down a $23 billion acquisition offer from Google, choosing instead to pursue an initial public offering (IPO). The acquisition would have been Google’s largest in the history of the internet giant.

Russia bragged that the worldwide tech outage did not affect its airlines and banks, thanks to its countermeasures against Western sanctions.

The U.S. cybersecurity company CrowdStrike issued a faulty software update to computers with Microsoft Windows on Friday, grounding flights.

Telecommunications giant AT&T says cybercriminals have stolen phone records belonging to “nearly all” of its customers. The compromised data includes millions of phone numbers, calling and text records, and information revealing its customers’ locations.

Japan’s “digital minister,” Kono Taro, announced Wednesday that the Japanese government no longer uses floppy disks to store data.

A cybersecurity team called the Insikt Group found that Chinese hackers intensified their attacks on Taiwan during its presidential election.

A Russian cyber gang is believed to be behind a ransomware attack that disrupted London hospitals and led to operations being canceled.

During an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, National Security Agency Director and U.S. Cyber Command Director Gen. Timothy Haugh said that the second biggest cyber weak link is the fact that “we’re really seeing China be very aggressive to use

In the wake of a damning report from the US Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), Google is seizing the opportunity to challenge Microsoft’s dominance in the enterprise security market by offering its services to government institutions.

Russia grooming groups for terror-like attacks, chief of UK eavesdropping office said, after several arrests across Europe for such activity. 

Sen. J.D. Vance warned about how America is “under attack” from Chinese government-sponsored state hacking group Volt Typhoon.

A report published by cybersecurity firm Mandiant last week claimed that a gang of hackers linked to the Russian government has attacked water utility companies around the world, including a treatment plant in the northern Texas town of Muleshoe.

A report published from watchdog group 38 North suggests U.S. animation companies may have unwittingly used work from North Korea.

FBI director Chris Wray said at a security conference on Thursday that China’s legion of state-sponsored hackers “considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage.” 

The AUKUS military alliance, whose founding members are Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, is reportedly considering Japan as a fourth member.

American and British officials on Monday announced criminal charges and punitive sanctions against a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group accused of victimizing millions of people in both countries over the past 14 years.

New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) revealed on Monday that Chinese state-sponsored hackers attacked two computer systems used by the New Zealand Parliament in 2021.

The McDonald’s fast-food chain suffered a worldwide system failure on Friday that knocked out the ordering system in many of its restaurants.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has revealed a staggering increase in financial losses due to cybercrime in the United States, reaching an unprecedented $12.5 billion in 2023. This represents a 22 percent jump in losses over 2022.

A data breach at Golden Corral restaurants has exposed the personal information of over 180,000 employees and their beneficiaries, the company disclosed this week.

A major AT&T network outage that affected tens of thousands of customers nationwide on Thursday was not the result of a cyberattack, the company said.

A massive trove of leaked documents reveals Chinese security firm I-Soon worked as hackers under contract to the Chinese government.

Researchers have reportedly discovered a new side-channel attack that can extract a person’s fingerprints from the sounds made when a finger swipes across a touchscreen.

Wyze, a security camera company boasting 10 million users, is in hot water after a breach allowed 13,000 customers to see into other people’s homes.

Chinese state media went into overdrive this week to distract from revelations of a massive state-linked Chinese cyberattack on U.S. infrastructure, howling that China is actually the world’s biggest victim of cybercrime, while America is the greatest threat to global information security.

The Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released “ethical guidelines” for brain-computer interfaces (BCI).