WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) — What was initially reported as a website ‘outage’ by Columbus County turns out to be something more sinister, a directed attack at the county’s web hosting service.
Despite expert advice against paying up, most victims of ransomware attacks in the region, including 88% in Australia and 78% in Singapore, have paid the ransom in full or in part, and the number of such attacks is only going to keep climbing amidst accelerated digital transformation efforts and remote work.
Small, boxy satellites are ridesharing their way into outer space—and may lead to important advances in laser communications and cybersecurity.
A team of researchers have devised a way to verify that a class of complex programs is bug-free without the need for traditional software testing. Called Armada, the system makes use of a technique called formal verification to prove whether a piece of software will output what it’s supposed to. It targets software that runs using concurrent execution, a widespread method for boosting performance, which has long been a particularly challenging feature to apply this technique to.
The collaborative effort between the University of Michigan, Microsoft Research, and Carnegie Mellon was recognized at ACM’s Programming Language Design and Implementation (PDLI 2020) with a Distinguished Paper Award.
Concurrent programs are known for their complexity, but have been a vital tool for increasing performance after the raw speed of processors began to plateau. Through a variety of different methods, the technique boils down to running multiple instructions in a program simultaneously. A common example of this is making use of multiple cores of a CPU at once.
The gang behind the Ragnar Locker ransomware posted an ad on Facebook in an attempt to publicly shame a victim so it would pay a ransom. Security experts say the innovative tactic is indicative of things to come.
See Also: Palo Alto Networks Ignite 20: Discover the Future of Cybersecurity, Today
Earlier this week, the cyber gang hacked into a random company’s Facebook advertising account and then used it to buy an ad containing a press release stating Ragnar Locker had breached the Italian liquor company Campari and demanded it pay the ransom or see its data released. The security firm Emsisoft provided an image of the ad to Information Security Media Group.
The newly discovered malware uses GitHub and Pastebin to house component code, and harbors 12 different initial attack vectors.
Ryu kidding?
Earlier this week it emerged that third-party giant Capcom’s internal systems had been hacked, though the company claimed that no customer data was affected. It has now emerged that the publisher was targeted by the Ragnar Locker ransomware, software designed to exfiltrate information from internal networks before encrypting the lot: at which point the victim is locked-out, contacted, and extorted.
Bleeping Computer broke the story, and managed to access the Ragnar Locker sample (a ‘proof’ provided to the victim by the hackers), which contains the ransom note allegedly delivered to Capcom. It reads as follows.
Continue reading “Capcom hit by ransomware attack, is reportedly being extorted for $11 million” »
