Amnesty International Canada experienced a security breach on October 5 with the ultimate conclusion being that state-sponsored Chinese hackers penetrated the system for espionage purposes.
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.
Wawa, a U.S. chain with over 850 convenience stores, suffered a payment card data breach which exposed customers’ credit card numbers, debit card numbers, expiration dates and cardholder names.
Microsoft Exchange zero-day vulnerabilities affect an estimated 250,000 on-premise servers. The company is aware of attacks involving a single state-sponsored group that compromised less than ten organizations.
Ransomware gangs search for non-public financial information that could affect stock prices during mergers and acquisitions and threaten to publish it to coerce the victim to pay.
Taking on a holistic approach with a multi-layer security strategy is absolutely necessary when protecting digital content from malicious actors.
Salesforce has confirmed another third-party breach affecting Gainsight applications integrated with customer instances, enabling attackers to exfiltrate customer data.
The FBI arrested and charged a New York man Connor Brian Fitzpatrick with cybercrime. Connor is alleged to be the hacking forum “BreachForums” owner and operator, Pompompurin.
Security firm disclosed a Microsoft data breach that exposed customer data affecting over 65,000 organizations in 111 countries. Microsoft expressed disappointment at the security firm for exaggerated numbers and releasing a search tool.
NSO Group was found to not only have exceeded its legal level of access to the WhatsApp servers and broken the terms of service with its Pegasus spyware, but to also have violated the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as California state law.
More than 3,000 #cybersecurity specialists and 1,258 algorithmic models worked 24 hours around the clock to fend off 2.2 billion cyber attacks on Singles Day. Just another day's work for Alibaba defending 300 million hacking attempts per day.










