North Carolina and Florida have banned ransomware payments for government agencies. Pennsylvania, New York, Texas, Arizona and New Jersey have also had bills of this nature recently come up for consideration.
Cyber Security
Cyber criminals, state-sponsored hackers and even the occasional disgruntled employee are constantly looking to gain unauthorized access for a variety of purposes: theft of money, cyber espionage, personal information for sale or for use in scams, and damage to critical infrastructure for just a few of the most common.
So how does an organization mitigate an entire world full of continual cyber attacks? Just as buildings have a number of necessary elements of physical security: access control, cameras, alarms and so on; there are similar key elements of cyber security that are absolutely vital for just about any modern business.
It starts with identifying and closing the most common doors that attackers use. For example, phishing attacks on employees are far and away the most common initial point of entry. The breach of even a low-level employee account can quickly turn into an escalation in access privileges and the ability to reach sensitive information. This is also true of smart devices, which are generally more poorly secured than computers and phones.
73% of organizations intensified software supply chain security efforts to address risks posed by open source code used by 80% of the companies, a Synopsys/ESG study found.
For organizations that grasp a vision of the future and begin to prepare for it now, vulnerability management will grow to be an integral part of their business risk management plan.
As organizations increase their smartphone, laptop, tablet, and other mobile device usage, they're also increasing their risk across these thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of endpoints.
Organizations must have effective defense against DDoS attacks and weaponization—not just for their own protection but also to limit the field for botnet recruitment and prevent service provider and corporate devices from being used in international cyber warfare.
An organization’s information security traditionally fell to specific job titles. In some cases, this may be a simple IT administrator for many smaller organizations, while larger organizations may have a full dedicated team. Today’s new security structure leverages all levels of an organization.
Twilio said that the data of 125 customers was accessed by the threat actors for some amount of time. Privacy messaging app Signal has indicated that the attackers had some level of access to about 1,900 registered phone numbers.
While cryptocurrencies have gone from red hot to full on meltdown in recent months, threat actors don’t show any signs of shying away from finding new and innovative ways to pursue this lucrative and relatively new financial category with increasingly complex and stealthy crypto-stealers.
UK water supplier, South Staffordshire PLC, suffered a Clop ransomware attack during one of the country’s worst droughts, with the gang mistakenly identifying another water utility as the victim.
The BlackByte ransomware gang's "2.0" reboot of their data leak site sports a new "feature" for its victims: a tiered payment system that allows for smaller payments to delay publication of sensitive data, or to simply download and recover it prior to having it dumped for public viewing.










