The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: data breach

Gone are the days when ransomware operators were happy with encrypting files on-site and more or less discretely charged their victims money for a decryption key. What we commonly find now is encryption with the additional threat of leaking stolen data, generally called Double-Extortion (or, as we like to call it: Cyber Extortion or Cy-X). This is a unique form of cybercrime in that we can observe and analyze some of the criminal action via 'victim shaming' leak sites. Since January 2020, we have applied ourselves to identifying as many of these sites as possible to record and document the victims who feature on them. Adding our own research, analyzing, and enriching data scraped from the various Cy-X operators and market sites, we can provide direct insights into the victimology from this specific perspective. We must be clear that what we are analyzing is a limited perspective on the crime. Nevertheless, the data gleaned from an analysis of the leak-threats proves to be ex

Europol, the European Union's premier law enforcement agency, has  announced  the arrest of a third Romanian national for his role as a ransomware affiliate suspected of hacking high-profile organizations and companies and stealing large volumes of sensitive data. The 41-year-old unnamed individual was apprehended Monday morning at his home in Craiova, Romania, by the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism ( DIICOT ) following a joint investigation in collaboration with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It's not currently known which ransomware gang the suspect was working with, but the development comes a little over a month after Romanian authorities  arrested two affiliates  of the REvil ransomware family, who are believed to have orchestrated no fewer than 5,000 ransomware attacks and extorted close to $600,000 from victims. Affiliates play a key role in the subscription-based ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) business models, a

It is a time when many are thinking of their families and loved ones, time off work, and gift-giving – the holidays. However, while many have their minds outside the realm of work during the holiday season, often, this is when attackers plan their most sinister attacks.  So how can you take precautions to protect your organization during these times? Why holidays put your company at risk of cyberattack Attackers today do not have a soft spot for businesses and give companies a break at any time of the year, especially not during holidays. On the contrary, any time of the year where companies may be less prepared to fend off a cyberattack is an opportunity for successful compromise. As a result, the holidays put your company at a higher risk of cyberattack.  Most end-users do not think about cybersecurity when surfing the web or receiving emails with holiday deals during the season. As a result, many let their guard down to a certain degree and become preoccupied and distracted m

Cryptocurrency trading platform BitMart has disclosed a "large-scale security breach" that it blamed on a stolen private key, resulting in the theft of more than $150 million in various cryptocurrencies. The breach is said to have impacted two of its hot wallets on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain and the Binance smart chain (BSC). The company  noted  that the wallets carried only a "small percentage" of the assets." Hot wallets, as opposed to their cold counterparts, are connected to the internet and allow cryptocurrency owners to receive and send tokens. Blockchain security and data analytics company PeckShield  estimated  the total loss to be around $200 million, calling the whole chain of events as "Pretty straightforward: transfer-out, swap, and wash." "This security breach was mainly caused by a stolen private key that had two of our hot wallets compromised," BitMart's chief executive Sheldon Xia  said  in a series of tweets sent