De makers van ransomware richten zich niet langer op consumenten, maar hebben steeds vaker het midden- en kleinbedrijf (mkb) als doelwit, zo stelt het Japanse anti-virusbedrijf Trend Micro.

Het mbk is een aantrekkelijk doelwit, aangezien het vaak niet over de beveiliging van grote ondernemingen beschikt.

De eigenaren zijn daarentegen wel vaak in staat om het gevraagde losgeld te betalen als hun bestanden door ransomware worden versleuteld. Ook speelt mee dat mkb-bedrijven vaak geen uitgebreide back-upoplossingen gebruiken, wat de kans vergroot dat er geen actuele back-up is en het losgeld uiteindelijk wordt betaald.

Just a day before the arrival of President Xi Jinping here for a meeting with President Obama that will be focused heavily on limiting cyberespionage, the Office of Personnel Management said Wednesday that the hackers who stole security dossiers from the agency also got the fingerprints of 5.6 million federal employees.

The attack on the agency, which is the main custodian of the government’s most important personnel records, has been attributed to China by American intelligence agencies, but it is unclear exactly what group or organization engineered it.

Before Wednesday, the agency had said that it lost only 1.1 million sets of fingerprints among the records of roughly 22 million individuals that were compromised.

Yesterday morning, Apple sent out an email to developers advising them that Apple had “removed apps from the App Store that were built with a counterfeit version of Xcode, which had the potential to cause harm to customers.”

Apple also suggested, as Fahmida Rashid reported Monday, that counterfeit copies of Xcode downloaded from third-party servers, not Apple’s, were responsible for creating the malware-infected apps.

Concurrent with the email, a post on the Apple developer blog appeared suggesting that developers validate their copy of Xcode to ensure it wasn’t a counterfeit copy spewing XcodeGhost malware.

Russia has been a prime suspect in recent cyberattacks launched against U.S. government targets. However, Russia has been poked with the other end of the hacker stick.

For more than two months, hacker attacks originating in China have bedeviled Russia's military and telecom sectors, researchers at Proofpoint revealed last week.

"We also observed attacks on Russian-speaking financial analysts working at global financial firms and covering telecom corporations in Russia, likely a result of collateral damage caused by the attackers' targeting tactics," wrote Thoufique Haq and Aleksy F, authors of the report.

The Morgan Stanley staffer fired in January over a massive data breach has now entered a guilty plea in the Federal Court in Manhattan.

Galen Marsh was being tried for taking hundreds of thousands of records of the bank's wealth management operation home. Some of the trove, affecting 900 individuals, then ended up on Pastebin as a pitch for the sale of the whole data set.

While early reports said six million accounts were offered for sale, complete with passwords (something Morgan Stanley denied in a statement), the prosecution's case said Marsh took a more modest 730,000 records away from the bank, affecting about 350,000 customers.

In an attempt to demonstrate how easy it would be for attackers to perform a high-voltage attack against a company's computer infrastructure and take it down by damaging it, security researcher Grigorios Fragkos found a device that can easily be used to "fry" other appliances on the network: computers, switches, attached storage devices, etc.

"Due to my experience with physical security assessments, I noticed that there are many unattended Ethernet ports everywhere around a building. These ports might not be 'active' but most of the time they are connected at the far-end on a managed or unmanaged network switch," he explained.

He decided to use these ports as a way in, and initially experimented with a single cable that connected a power socket to the Ethernet one, sending current directly to it. This resulted in the network switch at the other end being "toasted" in a split second, but nothing more.

Using external URL shortener services to create better-looking links to internal company documents, sensitive files and internal websites is a practice that company employees should avoid, says security researcher Shubham Shah, as it can result in those documents being accessed by individuals with malicious intentions.

As Shah and social engineer Christina Camilleri were searching for bugs to submit to the Etsy bug bounty program, they noticed that the company uses a dedicated URL shortener domain (http://etsy.me), but that the service is actually provided by Bit.ly via a SaaS arrangement.

With dirs3arch, an open source command line tool designed to brute force directories and files in websites, they tested this URL shortener service, and discovered a number of links that have been generated by the Etsy staff.

ENISA released the public version of the After Action Report of the pan-European cybersecurity exercise Cyber Europe 2014 (CE2014). This report, approved by the Member States, gives a high-level overview of the complex cybersecurity exercise that was carried out in 2014.

The main goal of Cyber Europe 2014 was to train Member States to cooperate during a cyber-crisis. The three-phased exercise provided opportunities to assess the effectiveness of cooperation and escalation procedures during cross-border cyber incidents which impact the security of vital services and infrastructure, while testing national capabilities and contingency plans involving both public and private sector organizations.

The exercise, organised by ENISA on a biannual basis, was planned jointly with representatives from the participating countries and required six (6) planning conferences across Europe.