Blog | Social Wireless Technologies Inc.

Aug 18, 2020
1 min

Google Chrome will try to stop you from typing into risky text boxes

"See that little “closed lock” icon in your web browser, right next to the URL? That means you’re browsing via HTTPS, encrypting your traffic so third parties can’t spy on most of the information you’re sending. But secure-looking HTTPS websites can still house insecure HTTP forms for you to fill in your passwords and other personal data — and Google is planning to do something about that in Chrome 86, coming this October (via 9to5Google). Google’s also disabling autofill on

Aug 18, 2020
1 min

Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year

"The files were retained due to a now-fixed bug, says Instagram. When you delete something from Instagram you expect it to be gone for good. But when security researcher Saugat Pokharel requested a copy of photos and direct messages from the photo-sharing app, he was sent data he’d deleted more than a year ago, showing that the information had never been entirely removed from Instagram’s servers. Instagram says this was due to a bug in its system that it’s now fixed, and Pokh

Aug 11, 2020
1 min

The US will pay up to $10 million if you can ID a foreign election hacker

"The 2020 US presidential election is less than 100 days away, and in an effort to prevent the foreign election interference that played a role in the 2016 election, the US Department of State announced today that it’s offering up to $10 million for any information that can identify someone who’s been meddling in a US election. Specifically, the State Department is offering the reward for “information leading to the identification or location of any person who works with or f

Jul 29, 2020
1 min

Cosmetics firm Avon faces new cyber security incident

"Technical information relating to Avon’s web and mobile sites was inadvertently left exposed on an unsecured Microsoft Azure server. Avon, the cosmetics brand that suffered an alleged ransomware attack in June 2020, has found itself at the centre of a new and significant security incident after inadvertently leaving a Microsoft Azure server exposed to the public internet without password protection or encryption. According to SafetyDetectives, the leaky server contained API

Jul 27, 2020
1 min

Black Threat Clouds Loom Over U.S. Organizations: The FBI Warns

"Thousands of organizations become victims to at least one form of cybercrime every year in the U.S, most of which come from foreign countries. This time, the FBI is warning big firms, government, and critical bodies against multiple threats targeting them. What happened? Last week, the FBI spotted new network protocols being abused by cybercriminals to launch large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. According to the report, the FBI has listed three network p

Jul 24, 2020
1 min

#COVID19 Home Working Leads to Cybersecurity Hiring Spree

"The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a major boost in cybersecurity job vacancies in the US, data from the Cybersecurity Jobs Report: Q2, has revealed. The study, produced by the International Consortium of Minority Cybersecurity Professionals (ICMCP) and CyberVista, indicates that the shift to remote working in the crisis has led to organizations investing more heavily in protecting themselves from cyber-threats. An estimated 62% of the US workforce has transitioned to working

Jul 23, 2020
1 min

Hundreds Of Thousands Of Instacart Customers’ Personal Data Is Being Sold Online

"Names, credit card data, addresses, and information on transactions as recent as yesterday are being sold online. The personal information of what could be hundreds of thousands of Instacart customers is being sold on the dark web. This data includes names, the last four digits of credit card numbers, and order histories, and appears to have affected customers who used the grocery delivery service as recently as yesterday. As of Wednesday, sellers in two dark web stores were

Jul 20, 2020
1 min

Russia trying to steal COVID-19 vaccine data, say UK, U.S. and Canada

"LONDON/OTTAWA (Reuters) - Hackers backed by the Russian state are trying to steal COVID-19 vaccine and treatment research from academic and pharmaceutical institutions around the world, Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said last Thursday. A co-ordinated statement from Britain, the United States and Canada attributed the attacks to group APT29, also known as Cozy Bear, which they said was almost certainly operating as part of Russian intelligence services. “We

Jul 20, 2020
1 min

New phishing campaign abuses a trio of enterprise cloud services

"A new phishing campaign uses a trio of enterprise cloud services, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics, and IBM Cloud, as part of an attempt to steal your login credentials. BleepingComputer recently analyzed a new phishing campaign that pretends to from a help desk named “servicedesk.com” that mimics similar wording used by real IT helpdesk domains in corporate environments. The email imitates a “quarantined mail” notification frequently sent out in workplaces by email secu

Jun 17, 2020
1 min

'Woefully lax': report slams CIA cybersecurity after hacking tool leak

"Many of the Central Intelligence Agency’s most sensitive hacking tools were so poorly secured that it was only when WikiLeaks published them online in 2017 that the agency realized they had been compromised, according to a report released Tuesday. The secret-spilling site drew international attention when it dumped a vast trove of malicious CIA code on the internet in March 2017. The digital tools, sometimes described as “cyber weapons,” provided a granular look at how the C

Jun 16, 2020
1 min

Claire's: Magecart E-Commerce Hackers Stole Card Data

Magecart Gangs Targeting Larger Organizations During Lockdown, Researcher Warns "Jewelry and accessories retailer Claire's says e-commerce platform hackers, using Magecart tactics, have stolen an unknown amount of its customers' payment card data. The attackers appear to have infiltrated the company's Salesforce Commerce Cloud environment for at least seven weeks, although the security firm that spotted the breach says there's no indication that the underlying Salesforce plat

Jun 15, 2020
1 min

Anonymous Hackers Target U.S. Police Again: ‘No More Impunity’

"Anonymous is back in the headlines with claims that another attack on a U.S. police website is linked to the hactivist group. In the weeks since Anonymous hackers threatened Minneapolis Police Department (MPD), that it would “expose your many crimes to the world,” speculation has been rife as to whether the group has returned, or is it just others corralling the “brand.” That speculation will now intensify with these new claims that it has struck again. The target this time

Jun 11, 2020
1 min

Alabama City to Pay Cyber-Ransom

"An Alabama city is paying over a quarter of a million dollars to cyber-criminals to recover data encrypted in a ransomware attack. Florence became a victim of the DoppelPaymer ransomware gang on June 5 in an attack that shut down the city's email system. The gang demanded 38 bitcoin, equivalent to USD $378,000, and threatened to publish or sell data stolen from Florence if the city didn't pay up. A security firm hired by Florence in the wake of the attack was able to negotia

Jun 10, 2020
1 min

Nintendo admits number of hacked accounts is almost double what it originally said

Up to 300,000 Nintendo Accounts were accessed. "Nintendo has revealed that an additional 140,000 user accounts were accessed by unauthorized means back in April. Previously, the company had said that only 160,000 accounts were affected and was slow to acknowledge the problem at the time. The news will come as a worry to those who are concerned about the security of their Nintendo Account and Nintendo Switch, although Nintendo stressed that less than one percent of all Nintend

Jun 8, 2020
1 min

US subsidiary of ST Engineering Aerospace suffers massive data breach

"SINGAPORE: About 1.5 terabytes of sensitive data was reportedly stolen from a US subsidiary of ST Engineering Aerospace in a massive data breach that was discovered on Friday (Jun 5), according to cybersecurity firm CYFIRMA. In response to queries by CNA, CYFIRMA said its initial investigation showed the breach at VT San Antonio Aerospace started “as early as in March”. It said the stolen data includes contract details with various governments of countries like Peru and Arge

Jun 5, 2020
1 min

Chinese and Iranian hackers targeted Biden and Trump campaigns, Google says

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - State-backed hackers from China have targeted staffers working on the U.S. presidential campaign of Democrat Joe Biden, a senior Google security official said on Thursday. The same official said Iranian hackers had recently targeted email accounts belonging to Republican President Donald Trump’s campaign staff. The announcement, made on Twitter by the head of Google’s Threat Analysis Group, Shane Huntley, is the latest indication of the digital spying

Jun 4, 2020
1 min

Huge Cyberattacks Attempt To Silence Black Rights Movement With DDoS Attacks

"After the death of George Floyd and the subsequent protests across the U.S., cyberattacks on advocacy groups spiked by an astonishing 1,120 times. It’s unclear who is behind the attacks, but they included attempts to neuter anti-racist organizations’ freedom of speech. The data comes from Cloudflare, a Silicon Valley company that protects a vast number of websites from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, where servers are flooded with traffic to make them inaccessi

Jun 2, 2020
1 min

Protest goes online in Minneapolis as city, police websites hit by cyberattacks

"The clash is now online in Minneapolis. Cyberattacks struck city government and law enforcement computers as mass anger over the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into his neck, led to major protests there. The operation, known as a denial of service attack, rendered websites for Minneapolis police and some city agencies inaccesibles for hours by overwhelming them with a flood of web traffic. A similar attack st

Jun 1, 2020
1 min

Judge demands Capital One release Mandiant cyberforensic report on data breach

"Attorneys suing the company will now have access to the report in preparation for a potential trial. A judge has ruled that Capital One must release the forensic report prepared by Mandiant following a data breach, of which the company is now being sued over. On Tuesday, Judge John Anderson from the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that Capital One is required to provide a copy of the report to attorneys suing the firm on behalf of customers impac

May 29, 2020
1 min

The Unaddressed Gap in Cybersecurity: Human Performance

"High-reliability cybersecurity operations leverage human performance as a critical layer of defense. An employee at Maersk, the world’s largest shipping conglomerate, saw computer screens suddenly turn black and irreversibly lock in late June 2017. A highly engineered malware worm exploited company computers in Ukraine lacking the latest Microsoft Windows security patches. With this small foothold, the worm breached the company’s IT system and blocked access to all computers