Ransomware has become one of the fastest growing cybercrimes of 2016. Worse, these attacks are growing in their sophistication, and the hackers deploying ransomware have been upping their game by branching out onto different systems.
As evidence, according to data provided by Kaspersky Lab, the number of users being attacked by mobile ransomware has quadrupled from last year to this.
Hard Rock Hotel & Casino has had some hard luck when it comes to data breaches. Last year, the company admitted that hackers had breached their POS (Point of Sale) credit card processing system from September 2014 through April of 2015, swiping credit card numbers, expiration dates, and card holder names.
By now, you’ve almost certainly heard the news. Microsoft’s latest OS, Windows 10, is free for the moment, but that’s ending as of July 29. After that point, if you want to upgrade, you’ll have to pay.
There is no doubt that the launch and adoption of Windows 10 has been wildly successful.
Ransomware is becoming an epidemic. It’s one of the fastest growing kinds of attacks we’re seeing in 2016, and the hacking community has shown a tremendous appetite for expanding the scope and scale of their operations.
PCs and laptops were, of course, obvious targets for this kind of attack, but we’re now seeing strains of ransomware that can attack smartphones, and lock you out of them, just like the software locks you out of your PC. There’s even at least one strain of ransomware that targets smart TVs.
Of course, for these types of software to work, the user has to be tricked into running the poisoned app and giving it administrator permissions, but there are tried and true methodologies for doing so.
Security company ForeScout has some disturbing new statistics about the state of digital corporate security. According to their research, 85% of IT professionals surveyed said they lacked confidence in their ability to spot a new device, imported by a user as it appeared on, and connected with the company’s network.
Barclaycard, one of the giants in the industry of global payments, has some disturbing new data to share about the state of cybersecurity in small and medium-sized businesses. Less than one in five of the businesses surveyed viewed cybersecurity as their top priority.
The FBI has issued an official warning of a new scam the hackers are using, and it’s costing business big bucks. According to the FBI, BEC (Business Email Compromise) has already cost the business community more than three billion dollars, and that figure grows by the day.
Apple recently, and very quietly, made an announcement that went largely unnoticed by technology press agents and reporters looking for juicy headline materials. It turns out that many may have missed the most important headline of them all. Namely, the coming release of Apple’s new file system, APFS.
Two things make this new filesystem noteworthy.
One of the biggest problems about successful data breaches is the fact that if the hackers are really good, it can be quite some time before their target is even aware there’s a problem. This appears to be the case with Acer, the world’s largest computer manufacturer.
The hacking community is at it again, and they’ve once more upped the ante. It wasn’t long ago that ransomware called Ransom32 that was partially written in NodeJS, but delivered via an executable file, had been the norm, that is until now. Now though, there’s a new threat.
