Money Extortion | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Hackers always find a way in, even if there's no software vulnerability to exploit. The FBI has arrested a Russian national who recently traveled to the United States and offered $1 million in bribe to an employee of a targeted company for his help in installing malware into the company's computer network manually. Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov , 27-year-old, entered the United States as a tourist and was arrested in Los Angeles after meeting with the unnamed employee of an undisclosed Nevada-based company numerous times, between August 1 to August 21, to discuss the conspiracy. "On or about July 16, EGOR IGOREVICH KRIUCHKOV used his WhatsApp account to contact the employee of victim company and arranged to visit in person in the District of Nevada," the court documents say. "On or about July 28, EGOR IGOREVICH KRIUCHKOV entered the United States using his Russian Passport and a B1/B2 tourist visa." Kriuchkov also asked the employee to participate in...

Hackers who recently hacked into HBO network and stole scripts, shows, and employee information documents, have now provided an email in which the United States cable channel offered them $250,000 . The company offered the payment as a "bounty payment" reward in which companies reward white-hat hackers for discovering cyber security vulnerabilities in their computer networks. Late last month, the HBO hackers claimed to have obtained around 1.5 terabytes of information from HBO and dropped upcoming episodes of "Ballers" and "Room 104," and a script of the fourth episode of "Game of Thrones." A week after that, the hackers released another half-gigabyte sample of its stolen HBO data, including company's emails, employment agreements, and financial balance sheets, along with the script of the upcoming episode of Game of Thrones, demanding a ransom—nearly $6 Million in Bitcoins . Now, according to a screenshot of an email obtained b...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

Yesterday, the most popular RSS reader Feedly was down as a result of a large scale distributed-denial-of service (DDoS) attack carried by the cybercriminals to extort money. On Wednesday, the Feedly was temporarily unavailable for its users. Feedly posted details of the attack at 5:00 AM ET on its blog saying that they were under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack and cyber-criminals were demanding money in return for returning the service to its normal operations. " Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop, " Edwin Khodabakchian, founder and CEO of Feedly said in a statement on Wednesday. He also expressed regret, " We want to apologize for the inconvenience. Please know that you data is safe and you will be able to re-access your feedly as soon as the attack is neutralized. " Feedly is a very popular RSS feed service which is available for desktop, iOS and...