MADRID (Reuters) — The Bank of Spain’s website has been hit since Sunday by a cyber attack which has temporarily disrupted access to the site, a spokesman for the central bank said on Monday.
Category: cybercrime/malcode – Page 203
When it comes to the individual citizen, whose responsibility is it to guard against cybercrime? Research we’ve conducted suggests that governments have a crucial role to play. They need to support individual citizens, as well as businesses, in a more practical and proactive way, to manage this particular society risk.
For instance, they could provide individuals with free face-to-face assistance and cybersecurity support. They could give clear guidelines and provide government sanctioned security software for people to install, and make sure it’s easy to get hold of. New York has recently started providing this kind of support to its residents. Based on our research, we believe there’s scope for all governments, including those in Southern Africa, to do the same.
Fraudsters are now gingerly testing the waters in central and Western Europe with attacks that drain cash machines of their funds, according to a trade group that studies criminal activity around ATMs.
See Also: How to Combat Targeted Business Email Compromise Attacks
The European Association for Secure Transactions, or EAST, says the attacks, sometimes referred to as “jackpotting,” rose 231 percent in 2017 compared to 2016. Last year, 193 incidents were reported compared to 58 in 2016.
THE FIN7 HACKING group has leeched, by at least one estimate, well over a billion dollars from companies around the world. In the United States alone, Fin7 has stolen more than 15 million credit card numbers from over 3,600 business locations. On Wednesday, the Justice Department revealed that it had arrested three alleged members of the group—and even more important, detailed how it operates.
The Justice Department announced the arrest of three members of notorious cybercrime group Fin7—and detailed some of their methods in the process.
According to Marc Ph. Stoecklin, principal research scientist at IBM Research, DeepLocker is a “new breed of highly targeted and evasive attack tools powered by AI.”
DeepLocker was designed in an attempt to improve understanding of how AI models can be combined with malware techniques to create a “new breed of malware,” Stoecklin explained in a post. This new type of malware can disguise its intent until it reaches an intended victim, which could be determined by taking advantage of facial recognition, geolocation, and voice recognition.
“The DeepLocker class of malware stands in stark contrast to existing evasion techniques used by malware seen in the wild. While many malware variants try to hide their presence and malicious intent, none are as effective at doing so as DeepLocker,” Stoecklin wrote.
Not long ago, getting a virus was about the worst thing computer users could expect in terms of system vulnerability. But in our current age of hyper-connectedness and the emerging Internet of Things, that’s no longer the case. With connectivity, a new principle has emerged, one of universal concern to those who work in the area of systems control, like João Hespanha, a professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. That law says, essentially, that the more complex and connected a system is, the more susceptible it is to disruptive cyber-attacks.
“It is about something much different than your regular computer virus,” Hespanha said. “It is more about cyber physical systems—systems in which computers are connected to physical elements. That could be robots, drones, smart appliances, or infrastructure systems such as those used to distribute energy and water.”
In a paper titled “Distributed Estimation of Power System Oscillation Modes under Attacks on GPS Clocks,” published this month in the journal IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, Hespanha and co-author Yongqiang Wang (a former UCSB postdoctoral research and now a faculty member at Clemson University) suggest a new method for protecting the increasingly complex and connected power grid from attack.