A worrying trend which has seen companies as large as Tesla in the firing line is raising alarm bells for corporates. Hacking groups are now joining forces to take on larger corporates, using profit sharing arrangements, and creating playbooks or scripts to facilitate negotiation. Some attackers are even adopting a customer-friendly tone for negotiation. Approximately $1.4 billion was paid to ransomware attackers last year.
The US Treasury is warning businesses who pay ransomware attackers that they could be violating anti-money laundering and sanctions regulations. Their arguments have been supported by organisations like the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and the Office of Foreign Assets. Instead, companies should take a risk-based compliance approach. The government said: “This also applies to companies that engage with victims of ransomware attacks, such as those involved in providing cyber insurance, digital forensics and incident response, and financial services that may involve processing ransom payments.”
Six tech experts have lent their thoughts on the latest in cybersecurity for Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Among their tips were having a key strategy in place, having a full understanding of all your vulnerable devices, keeping an eye out for phishing attacks, checking the security of the cloud, increasing employee training, and being careful with information sharing when working remotely.
Cybersecurity attacks have increased by 400% since March, leading experts to make an intrinsic link between attacks and the coronavirus. Attacks comprised half a million Zoom user account hacks, unemployment data breaches, and an increase in traffic to popular hacking websites. Moreover, a whole city was subjected to a ransomware attack as computer files were stolen.
Ahead of the 2020 US elections, a cybersecurity chief has said that mail-in election votes and slower results are evidence that the ‘system is working’. Brandon Wales, executive director at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is keen to stop the spread of misinformation in the lead-up to the election on November 3rd. He says: “The truth is that nothing about this process changes when the election will be officially done.”
Experts at Computer Weekly are hailing cybersecurity as the “next frontier” for the open source development model. A spokesperson for IBM Security reaffirmed the point, stating that cybersecurity will improve visibility and bring different silos together. Vice President of IBM Justin Youngblood said most IT environments were “dotted with security tools that protect a plethora of workloads on the cloud”, which could overwhelm teams.
