Canadian power utilities Emera and Nova Scotia have suffered cyber attacks that forced the companies to shut down some business application servers.
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.
DeFi protocols had a bad day as Sonne Finance took the bulk of the loss, with about $20 million stolen via an exploitable bug. Cyber attacks also hit two other providers.
Latest study from Ponemon Institute indicates cyber attacks on SMBs are again on the rise and the new attacks appear to be focusing on SMBs in specific regions, with U.S. getting the worst of it.
The cyber crime group that locked up an Indonesian national data center last month, impacting hundreds of government services, has opted to provide the ransomware decryptor for free. This was accompanied by an apology, but also a donation link exhorting the Indonesian government and public to show gratitude for their supposed generosity.
Cyber crime services have become cheaper and easier to obtain with $1.5 trillion reaped from the cyber crime services offered on the dark web marketplaces annually.
Recent 2019 ISACA annual report shows key interesting cyber security trends which includes underreporting of cyber crimes and internal employees being the third-greatest security threat.
Cost of cyber crime has kept on growing and the underground market is now a legitimate $114 billion economy. We need a global effort to combat this threat.
2020 and 2021 were record years for ransomware payments at about $765 million. The take collected by ransomware operators is now down 40% to $457 million in 2022.
Research links three major cybercriminal gangs to 30% of all global non-credit data breaches. Two Canadian teens are presumed to be directly attributed to roughly 42% of all non-credit card related data breaches that occurred between January 2017 to June of 2020.
The problem of social media cyber crime is growing at an astonishing rate and is now a $3 billion business. According to a recent report, nearly 1 in 5 organizations worldwide are now infected by malware distributed by social media.










