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The Cyber Police of Ukraine has  arrested  three individuals on suspicion of hijacking more than 100 million emails and Instagram accounts from users across the world. The suspects, aged between 20 and 40, are said to be part of an organized criminal group living in different parts of the country. If convicted, they face up to 15 years in prison. The accounts, authorities said, were taken over by carrying out brute-force attacks, which employ trial-and-error methods to guess login credentials. The group operated under the direction of a leader, who distributed the hacking tasks to other members. The cybercrime group subsequently monetized their ill-gotten credentials by putting them up for sale on dark web forums. Other threat actors who purchased the information used the compromised accounts to conduct a variety of  fraudulent schemes , including those in which scammers reach out to the victim's friends to urgently transfer money to their bank account. "You can protect

Europol, along with the Spanish and the Romanian national police, has arrested 26 individuals in connection with the theft of over €3.5 million ($3.9 million) by hijacking people's phone numbers via SIM swapping attacks. The law enforcement agencies arrested 12 and 14 people in Spain and Romania, respectively, as part of a joint operation against two different groups of SIM swappers, Europol said . The development comes as SIM swapping attacks are emerging as one of the biggest threats to telecom operators and mobile users alike. The increasingly popular and damaging hack is a clever social engineering trick used by cybercriminals to persuade phone carriers into transferring their victims' cell services to a SIM card under their control. The SIM swap then grants attackers access to incoming phone calls, text messages, and one-time verification codes (or one-time passwords ) that various websites send via SMS messages as part of the two-factor authentication (2FA) proc

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

Tanvir Hassan Zoha , a 34-year-old security researcher, who spoke to media on the $81 Million Bangladesh Bank cyber theft , has gone missing since Wednesday night, just days after accusing Bangladesh's central bank officials of negligence. Zoha was investigating a recent cyber attack on Bangladesh's central bank that let hackers stole $81 Million from the banks' Federal Reserve bank account. Though the hackers tried to steal $1 Billion from the bank, a simple typo prevented the full heist. During his investigation, Zoha believed the Hackers, who are still unknown, had installed Malware on the bank's computer systems few weeks before the heist that allowed them to obtain credentials needed for payment transfers. With the help of those credentials, the unknown hackers transferred large sums from Bangladesh's United States account to fraudulent accounts based in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. However, at the same time, Zoha accused senior offic

The recent cyber attack on Bangladesh's central bank that let hackers stole over $80 Million from the institutes' Federal Reserve bank account was reportedly caused due to the Malware installed on the Bank's computer systems. Few days ago, reports emerged of a group of unknown hackers that broke into Bangladesh's central bank, obtained credentials needed for payment transfers from Federal Reserve Bank of New York and then transferred large sums to fraudulent accounts based in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. The criminal group was able to steal a total value of about $81 Million from the Federal Reserve's Bangladesh account through a series of fraudulent transactions, but a typo in some transaction prevented a further $850 Million Heist . However, the question was still there: How the Hackers managed to transfer $80 Million without leaving any Trace? Security researchers from FireEye's Mandiant forensics are helping the Dhaka investigat

Typos are really embarrassing, but this time it saved the Bangladesh Central Bank and the New York Federal Reserve by preventing a nearly $1 Billion ( £700 Million ) heist. Last month, some unknown hackers broke into Bangladesh's central bank, obtained credentials needed for payment transfers and then transfer large sums to fraudulent accounts based in the Philippines and Sri Lanka . But… A single spelling mistake in an online bank transfer instruction prevented the full theft, according to Reuters . Here's what actually was happened: Nearly three dozen requests hit the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on 5 February using the Bangladesh Bank's SWIFT code, out of which four resulted in successful transfers, for a total value of about $81 million. However, when the hackers attempted to make their fifth transfer of $20 Million to a Sri Lankan non-governmental organization called the Shalika Foundation , they made a typo by attempting a transfer to the Shalika "

A 26-year-old hacker has been sentenced to 334 years in prison for identity theft as well as mass bank fraud in Turkey, or in simple words, he has been sentenced to life in prison . Named Onur Kopçak , the hacker was arrested in 2013 for operating a phishing website that impersonated bank site, tricking victims into providing their bank details including credit card information. Kopçak's website was part of a big credit card fraud scheme in which he and other 11 operators were making use of the illegally obtained bank account details to carry out fraudulent operations. During his arrest in 2013, Turkish law authorities charged Kopçak with: Identity fraud Website forgery Access device fraud Wire fraud... ...and sentenced him to 199 years 7 months and 10 days in prison, following complaints from 43 bank customers. However, during the investigation, 11 other bank customers also filed complaints about their payment card fraud, thus triggering a new trial

As the most wonderful time of the year has come - Christmas , it has brought with itself the time of online shopping. According to National Retail Federation , more than 151 million people shopped in store, but more than 100 Million shopped online during Cyber Monday sales and even why wouldn't it be so given the vast conveniences of online shopping. It is quite visible in these days that more and more people are heading towards online shopping rather than the malls to purchase gifts for Christmas. However, the main question arises: Is it safe to do so? Especially with so many users sharing credit card information online. Here are some tips that you have to keep in mind before providing your credit card number and clicking, ' BUY ' 1. DO NOT CLICK On Suspicious Links Malicious links are sent by scammers who look more real than the original ones. As these links are specifically of the well-known sites like eBay and Flipkart, many online users fal

Two former Federal investigators who helped to shut down the infamous black-market website ' Silk Road ' accused of fraud and stealing more than a Million dollars in Bitcoins during their investigation. Silk Road, an infamous online drug market that hosted more than $200 Million in transactions, was seized by the FBI in 2013, but during that period two of FBI agents took advantage of their position. CHARGES AGAINST FEDS The US Department of Justice indictment charges 46-year-old former Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) special agent Carl Force , and 32-year-old former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges , with the following charges: Theft of government property Wire fraud Money laundering Conflict of interest MILLION DOLLAR EXTORTION Both Force and Bridges were part of Baltimore's Silk Road Task Force to investigate illegal activity in the black marketplace. The creator of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested and found guilty of running the Tor-h

More than half of South Korea's 50 million population aged between 15 and 65 have been affected in a massive data breach, compromising their personal information. The data breach came to light when 16 individual were arrested following the theft of about 220 million stolen records from a number of online game, ringtone storefronts and movie ticket sites that contains personally identifiable information related to 27 million victims. The stolen records included actual name, account name, password and resident registration number of the victims, According to the English version of a Seoul-based daily newspaper, the Korea Joongang Daily . Among 16 perpetrators, the South Jeolla Provincial Police Agency arrested a 24-year-old man named 'Kim' , for allegedly obtaining and selling all 220 million personal information including names, registration numbers, account names, and passwords , from a Chinese hacker he met through an online game in 2011. Police estimated the

The Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman ' Patrick Leahy ' reintroduced a revamped version of the " Personal Data Privacy and Security Act " for tough criminal penalties for hackers, that he originally authored in 2005. During last Christmas Holidays, a massive data breach had occurred at the shopping giant  Target,  involving hack of 40 million credit & debit cards, used to pay for purchases at its 1500 stores nationwide in the U.S. Reason: "Target Data Breach? Seriously"?  In a statement, as published below, the Senator wrote: "The recent data breach at Target involving the debit and credit card data of as many as 40 million customers during the Christmas holidays is a reminder that developing a comprehensive national strategy to protect data privacy and cybersecurity remains one of the most challenging and important issues facing our Nation" It seems that the  TARGET Breach  was scheduled, as the best opportunity to ramp up the cyber secu

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has added five new hackers to its Cyber most wanted list and is seeking information from the public regarding their whereabouts. The men are wanted in connection with hacking and fraud crimes both within the US as well as internationally. Rewards ranging from up to $50,000 to $100,000 are being offered for information that leads to their arrest. Two of them are Pakistani, Farnhan Arshad and Noor Aziz Uddin , who caused the damage of over $50 million after hacking business telephone systems between 2008 and 2012. Arshad and Uddin are part of an international criminal ring that the FBI believes extends into Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Spain, Singapore, Italy, Malaysia, and other locations. Syrian national Andrey Nabilevich Taame , wanted for his alleged role in Operation Ghost Click , a malware scheme that compromised more than four million computers in more than 100 countries between 2007 and October 2011

An Anonymous Hacker and Online hacktivist who was  responsible for hacking into the City of Springfield's website and others Police websites has been sentenced to 3 years in federal prison. John Anthony Borell III, a 22-year-old man from Ohio with the online handle @ItsKahuna started advertising his exploits using the Twitter and encouraged other hackers to crack websites as part of campaigns run by an Anonymous offshoot called CabinCr3w . Borell admitted to compromising the websites belongs to various Law Enforcement Agencies from Los Angeles, Syracuse, The official city site for Springfield, Missouri and many more.  He also exposed the names and private details of almost 500 police officers after using an automated script to carry out SQL injection attacks on websites belonging to the Utah Chiefs of Police and the Salt Lake City Police Department. Hacker denied involvement in the attacks on April 2012, but later he pleaded guilty to computer fraud charges and agreed to pay $22