With a second attack in as many weeks, food cooperatives are the latest link in the supply chain that is under siege from cyberattacks. In other cyber security news, over 100 purported members of the Italian mafia were arrested by international law enforcement in connection to an extensive phishing campaign.
Italian Mafia members arrested for phishing campaign
Over 100 individuals of the Italian Mafia have been arrested in relation to an extensive phishing campaign. Multiple international law enforcement organizations cooperated to apprehend suspects in both Spain and Italy. In addition to the arrests, officers seized a plethora of stolen payment cards and drug processing equipment, and they froze 100+ related financial accounts. It is believed that the group was responsible for over $11 million in various fraud schemes within the last year.
Alaskan health department suffers cyber-attack
Nearly four months after identifying an unauthorized intrusion into their systems, officials for the Alaskan Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) have finally begun releasing additional information on the extent of the attack. They believe the attack was the work of nation-state hackers who have potentially accessed databases containing highly sensitive personal information for thousands of Alaskan citizens.
Anonymous responsible for Epik data breach
Malicious actors from the hacktivist group Anonymous have recently posted nearly 180GB of purportedly stolen data. They claim to have breached the Epik service provider’s internal systems and may have accessed the personal records of over 15 million unique emails belonging to both customers and non-customers of Epik. Along with this data, they may have also accessed other personally identifiable information that was stored by Epik after being scraped from other sources. Officials for Epik have also confirmed the breach and are contacting affected individuals to offer identity monitoring.
Security researcher finds own data amongst 200GB data leak
More than 100 million visitors to Thailand have had their personally identifiable data compromised via an unsecured Elasticsearch database that contains over 200GB of sensitive data. The database seems to contain visitor data for anyone that has visited the country in the last decade or so, and has since been properly secured by the rightful administrator. The administrator states that the database hasn’t been maliciously accessed, though outside sources have yet to confirm this claim.
Second farming cooperative attacked in two weeks
Following the cyberattack on the NEW Cooperative in Iowa last week, the Minnesota-based Crystal Valley Cooperative becomes the second farming cooperative to fall victim to a ransomware attack. While some ransomware groups state that they won’t target critical infrastructure, the BlackMatter group claims that they don’t consider farming cooperatives to be critical services. This is despite the fact that disrupting food supply chains can cause devastation to multiple states or regions.