The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Targeted ransomware attacks on banking and finance, government , healthcare , and critical infrastructure are on the rise, with the latest victim being the state government of Louisiana. The state government of Louisiana was hit by a large-scale coordinated ransomware attack yesterday, which forced the state to take several state agency servers offline, including government websites, email systems, and other internal applications, to mitigate the risk of the malware's infection from spreading. The Monday's ransomware attack resulted in the subsequent shutdown of a majority of large state agencies, including the Office of the Governor, the Office of Motor Vehicles, the Department of Health, the Department of Children and Family Services, and the Department of Transportation and Development, among others. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards revealed the incident in a series of tweets, saying that he had activated the state's cybersecurity team in response to the cyber ...

As the world becomes more interconnected by the day, more and more companies of all sizes and industries are finding themselves under attack by fearless cybercriminals who can access their entire server farms from across the globe with only a few lines of code. And it's not just private corporations that are suffering. A wide range of government agencies are also constantly under attack, and national security is relying more and more on counter-cyberattack measures to safeguard everything from classified data to entire power grids. So it should come as no surprise that the overarching field of information security is booming, and those with the skills to thwart and retaliate against a growing number of sophisticated cyber threats are in high-demand across countless industries. The Complete Information Security Certification Bundle will help you join this lucrative field, and it's currently available for over 95% off at just $31. With 7 courses and over 80 hours of...

The recent controversies surrounding the WhatsApp hacking haven't yet settled, and the world's most popular messaging platform could be in the choppy waters once again. The Hacker News has learned that last month WhatsApp quietly patched yet another critical vulnerability in its app that could have allowed attackers to remotely compromise targeted devices and potentially steal secured chat messages and files stored on them. The vulnerability — tracked as CVE-2019-11931 — is a stack-based buffer overflow issue that resided in the way previous WhatsApp versions parse the elementary stream metadata of an MP4 file, resulting in denial-of-service or remote code execution attacks. To remotely exploit the vulnerability, all an attacker needs is the phone number of targeted users and send them a maliciously crafted MP4 file over WhatsApp, which eventually can be programmed to install a malicious backdoor or spyware app on the compromised devices silently. The vulnerability ...

It appears that at least the United States has started taking the threat of Sim Swapping attacks very seriously. Starting with the country's first-ever conviction for 'SIM Swapping' this February, U.S. Department of Justice has since then announced charges against several individuals for involving in the scheme to siphon millions of dollars in cryptocurrency from victims. In the latest incident, the U.S. authorities on Thursday arrested two more alleged cybercriminals from Massachusetts, charging them with stealing $550,000 in cryptocurrency from at least 10 victims using SIM swapping between November 2015 and May 2018. SIM Swapping, or SIM hijacking, is a technique that typically involves the social engineering of a target's mobile phone provider. An attacker makes a phony call posing as their targets and convinces the mobile phone provider to port the target's phone number to a SIM card belonging to the attacker. Once successful, the attacker can t...

Security researchers have tracked down activities of a new group of financially-motivated hackers that are targeting several businesses and organizations in Germany, Italy, and the United States in an attempt to infect them with backdoor, banking Trojan, or ransomware malware. Though the new malware campaigns are not customized for each organization, the threat actors appear to be more interested in businesses, IT services, manufacturing, and healthcare industries who possess critical data and can likely afford high ransom payouts. According to a report ProofPoint shared with The Hacker News, the newly discovered threat actors are sending out low-volume emails impersonating finance-related government entities with tax assessment and refund lured emails to targeted organizations. "Tax-themed Email Campaigns Target 2019 Filers, finance-related lures have been used seasonally with upticks in tax-related malware and phishing campaigns leading up to the annual tax filing deadlines in...