Gozi Virus | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Colombian authorities on Wednesday said they have arrested a Romanian hacker who is wanted in the U.S. for distributing a virus that infected more than a million computers from 2007 to 2012. Mihai Ionut Paunescu (aka "Virus"), the individual in question, was detained at the El Dorado airport in Bogotá, the Office of the Attorney General of Colombia  said . Paunescu was  previously charged  by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) in January 2013 for operating a bulletproof hosting service that "enabled cyber criminals to distribute the Gozi Virus, the Zeus Trojan and other notorious malware, and conduct other sophisticated cyber crimes." He was arrested in Romania in December 2012 but managed to avoid extradition to the U.S. "Through this service, Paunescu, like other bulletproof hosts, knowingly provided critical online infrastructure to cyber criminals that allowed them to commit online criminal activity with little fear of detection by law enforcement,&

A Russian man who spent about 3 years behind bars in the United States has been spared further prison time but ordered to pay $7 Million to cover damages he caused to banks using a vicious computer virus. Nikita Vladimirovich Kuzmin was arrested in 2010 and imprisoned in August 2011 for developing a sophisticated computer malware called Gozi and infecting more than 1 million computers worldwide, causing tens of millions of dollars in losses. Kuzmin was sentenced Monday to the 37 months he has already served in custody, and ordered to pay $6,934,979 that authorities have identified as the damages experienced by two major Banks, one located in the U.S. and the other in Europe, Department of Justice says . Kuzmin received a lighter sentence due to his "substantial assistance" in the investigation that resulted in the conviction of Latvian national Deniss Calovskis as well as the arrest of Romanian Mihai Ionut Paunescu, who is awaiting extradition to the United States.

Shadow apps, a segment of Shadow IT, are SaaS applications purchased without the knowledge of the security team. While these applications may be legitimate, they operate within the blind spots of the corporate security team and expose the company to attackers.  Shadow apps may include instances of software that the company is already using. For example, a dev team may onboard their own instance of GitHub to keep their work separate from other developers. They might justify the purchase by noting that GitHub is an approved application, as it is already in use by other teams. However, since the new instance is used outside of the security team's view, it lacks governance. It may store sensitive corporate data and not have essential protections like MFA enabled, SSO enforced, or it could suffer from weak access controls. These misconfigurations can easily lead to risks like stolen source code and other issues. Types of Shadow Apps  Shadow apps can be categorized based on their interac

Once again the Red Alarm had been long wailed in the Security Desk of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( NASA ). Yes! This time, a serious hacktivism had been triggered by the Hacking group named " AnonSec " who made their presence in the cyber universe by previous NASA Hacks. The AnonSec Members had allegedly released 276 GB of sensitive data which includes 631 video feeds from the Aircraft & Weather Radars; 2,143 Flight Logs and credentials of 2,414 NASA employees, including e-mail addresses and contact numbers. The hacking group has  released a self-published paper named " Zine " that explains the magnitude of the major network breach that compromised NASA systems and their motives behind the leak. Here's How AnonSec Hacked into NASA The original cyber attack against NASA was not initially planned by AnonSec Members, but the attack went insidious soon after the Gozi Virus Spread that affected millions of systems a