Cyber criminals have been relentless this year. Data breaches, network infiltrations, bulk data theft and sale, identity theft, and ransomware outbreaks all occurred over 2020. Remote workers account for up to 20% of cybersecurity incidents, and ransomware is on the rise,
This month alone ahs seen amjor breaches:
Leonardo SpA: Italian police arrested suspects believed to have stolen up to 10GB in sensitive corporate and military data from the defense contractor.
Flight Centre: A 2017 hackathon launched by the company was found to be the source of a leak involving credit card records and passport numbers belonging to close to 7,000 people.
Vancouver TransLink: A ransomware attack disrupted Compass metro cards and Compass ticketing kiosks for two days.
Absa: A rogue employee at the South Africa-based bank is thought to be responsible for the leak of personally identifiable information belonging to customers.
HMRC: The UK tax office was branded ‘incompetent’ due to 11 serious data breaches impacting close to 24,000 people.
Microsoft Warns Of New Malware That Wants To Infect Your Browser: Security experts at Microsoft have been tracking a new malware campaign that’s targeting Windows computers. It’s already claimed tens of thousands of victims and hijacked their web browsers.
Earlier this month Microsoft issued its final batch of security updates for Windows PCs in 2020, ending the year with a relatively light patch load. Nine of the 58 security vulnerabilities addressed this month earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label, meaning they can be abused by malware or miscreants to seize remote control over PCs without any help from users
On December 8, 2020, FireEye disclosed theft of their Red Team assessment tools. These tools are used by FireEye to test and validate the security posture of their customers. According to FireEye, the hackers now have an influential collection of new techniques to draw upon.
FireEye, last week also said it had discovered a “global intrusion campaign” that it called “widespread” in a blog post published Sunday evening. “The actors behind this campaign gained access to numerous public and private organizations around the world,” FireEye discovered a supply chain attack trojanizing SolarWinds Orion business software updates in order to distribute malware we call SUNBURST.
The attacker’s post compromise activity leverages multiple techniques to evade detection and obscure their activity, but these efforts also offer some opportunities for detection.”
The U.S. Commerce Department on Sunday confirmed a security “breach” at one of its bureaus, and said federal authorities are investigating.
Reuters, the news agency first reported the hack, and cited sources who said the U.S. Treasury Department was also breached, and that hackers may have broken into other government agencies as well. The sources told Reuters that hackers may have been able to monitor staff emails at the agencies for months. And also Reuters reported that the affected bureau at the Commerce Department was the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Subsequently the US issued an emergency warning that “nation-state” hackers hijacked software used by almost all Fortune 500 companies and multiple federal agencies to gain entry to secure IT systems.”
On Sunday the Washington Post reported that the attack had been traced to Russian state-backed hacking groups.
Its important that organisations are aware of the threats and have appropriate safeguards, polices and training. in the event of a breach its also important to have clearly defined policies of how to respond -its not just about dealing with the threat but also the consequences. For example Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Twitter €450,000 (~$550,000) for failing to notify the DPC of a breach within the 72-hour timeframe imposed by European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and to adequately document it.
To cap it all Avast announced this week that more than three million Internet users have installed 15 Chrome plug-ins and 13 Edge plug-ins that contain malicious code, .
These add-ons contain code that can redirect user traffic to ads and phishing sites, collect personal information such as birth dates, email addresses, and active devices, collect search history, and download other malware to the user device., Avast researchers believe that the primary goal of this campaign is to redirect user traffic for money.
Avast said that it discovered the add-ons last month and found evidence that some of these have been active at least since December 2018, when users first started reporting problems with redirection to other websites.
Jan Rubin, a malware researcher at Avast, said they could not determine if the extensions contained malicious code from the beginning or if the code was added by an update when each of them reached a certain level of popularity. Many add-ons have become very popular, with tens of thousands of installations. In the case of most , this is achieved by presenting these as add-ons that can help users download multimedia content from various social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo or Spotify. Avast said that both Google and Microsoft reported their findings and that both companies are still checking the add-ons.
Two days after Avast released its findings,: Google has removed all 15 Chrome add-ons that Avast has found to contain malicious code, while most Edge add-ons are still available for download. Only Pretty Kitty, The Cat Pet and SoundCloud Music Downloader have been removed.
Below is a list of Chrome add-ons that Avast said contain malicious code:
Direct Message for Instagram
DM for Instagram
Invisible mode for Instagram Direct Message
Downloader for Instagram
App Phone for Instagram
Stories for Instagram
Universal Video Downloader
Video Downloader for FaceBook™
Vimeo™ Video Downloader
Zoomer for Instagram and FaceBook
VK UnBlock. Works fast.
Odnoklassniki UnBlock. Works quickly.
Upload photo to Instagram™
Spotify Music Downloader
The New York Times News
Here’s a list of Edge plug-ins that contain malicious code:
Direct Message for Instagram™
Instagram Download Video & Image
App Phone for Instagram
Universal Video Downloader
Video Downloader for FaceBook™
Vimeo™ Video Downloader
Volume Controller
Stories for Instagram
Upload photo to Instagram™
Pretty Kitty, The Cat Pet
Video Downloader for YouTube
SoundCloud Music Downloader
Instagram App with Direct Message DM
