Multiple Individuals Charged for Twitter Hack
Three people have been identified and charged with the Twitter hack that occurred last month, that generated over $100,000 in bitcoin, through hijacking high-profile accounts. Of the 130 accounts that were used to spread the Bitcoin scam, some major names included Elon Musk and Bill Gates, who have been portrayed in similar scams in the past. It appears that the FBI was able to identify the perpetrators through a known hacking forum that offered up Twitter account hacking services for a fee.
Colorado Town Suffers Ransomware Attack
The town of Lafayette, CO became the victim of a ransomware attack last week, and unfortunately didn’t have the capabilities to recover from the attack without paying the ransom, of $45,000 in cryptocurrency. The attack itself took many of the City’s major services offline for a number of days, until officials determined they wouldn’t be able to recover without paying for their systems to be decrypted. In situations like this, having a backup of your data, even if it is somewhat out of date, is still a better recovery method and usually cheaper than paying for a ransom that doesn’t guarantee the return your data.
Millions of Social Media Profiles Exposed
Due to a misconfigured database, over 235 million social media profiles from several major platforms have been publicly exposed. The databases included personally identifiable information such as names, locations, and contact data. Social Data, an online data marketing broker, seems to be the owner of the data, though it is unclear as to what means they used to obtain the original data as data scraping for profit is generally not tolerated by Facebook and other platforms. According to Social Data, the database was still exposed for up to 3 hours after initially being spotted, it is still unknown as to how long the data was accessible without any authentication.
Maze Ransomware Cartel Adds New Variant Team
The authors of the lesser-known ransomware variant SunCrypt have recently joined forces with the Maze ransomware cartel, with the hopes of mutually benefiting from the allegiance. It is believed that the new members of the cartel are brought in to assist with the high volume of attacks that the Maze Group are being hired for, and in turn are being paid with a generous portion of the extorted profits. In addition to the revenue streams that come with being part of a massive organization, the cartel members also benefit from access to the Maze Group’s resources including obfuscation techniques and posting cartel member’s stolen data to their dedicated leak site.
Thousands of Android Users fall Victim to Giveaway Fraud
Upwards of 65,000 Android users may have been compromised after installing a malicious app that promised the victims free items. In the year that the scam was in effect, roughly 5,000 apps were spoofed, all attempting to lure victims into downloading them with a phony giveaway. The infection itself pushes silent ads to run in the background of the device, generating ad revenue for the scammers and decreasing the device’s overall performance