Hackers
A hacker tried to drastically increase the sodium hydroxide addition to the drinking water supply of Oldsmar, Florida shortly before the Super Bowl game. An employee of the groundwater treatment plant noticed the movement of his mouse pointer and was able to intervene in good time. The sheriff has not yet given any information on the perpetrators or motives.
Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red announced on Twitter that they have been the victim of a hacker attack. Apparently, the security barriers of the internal network were cracked and numerous datasets were stolen with the help of malware, as well as some of them were made unusable for the developer. Personal data, according to the developer, was not affected.
U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech said on Wednesday that documents related to development of their COVID-19 vaccine had been “unlawfully accessed” in a cyberattack on Europe’s medicines regulator.
Hackers from China, Russia and Iran are targeting the 2020 presidential elections, Microsoft found. In a blog post, Microsoft stated that the three hacker groups Strontium (Russia), Zirconium (China) and Phosphorus (Iran) have launched attacks aimed at both the Democratic and Republican party. The groups have attacked "more than 200 organizations including political campaigns, advocacy groups, parties and political consultants", "high-profile individuals associated with the election" including associates of Biden's campaign and "personal accounts of people associated" with the Trump campaign.
"The majority of these attacks were detected and stopped by security tools built into our products. We have directly notified those who were targeted or compromised so they can take action to protect themselves," so Microsoft
Telecom, Argentina's largest telecommunications company, suffered a ransomware attack to its call centre on July 18. The attackers asked for a $7.5 million ransom demand to unlock encrypted files, a value that should double if not paid in 48 hours.
The company announced : "Telecom reports that it managed to contain a cyber attack attempt, of global dispersion, on its platforms. No critical services of the company were affected. It should also be noted that no client of the company was affected by this situation, as well as the bases of company data. Customer service efforts, suspended preventively, will be gradually restored.".
American, British and Canadian governments have warned of Russian hackers trying to steal Covid-19 vaccine research by exploiting software flaws to access computer systems. While the UK's National Cyber Security Centre is "almost certain" that the attack came from a "part of Russian intelligence services", Russia has denied these claims.
"We do not have information about who may have hacked into pharmaceutical companies and research centres in Great Britain. We can say one thing - Russia has nothing at all to do with these attempts," so Dmitry Peskov, spokesperson of President Putin.
New Zealand Police has frozen $90 million from a New Zealand based company belonging to Alexander Vinnik who had been arrested in July 2017 while on a family vacation in Greece. The Russian IT expert has an open extradition warrant from the United States and France where the authorities accuse him of money laundering, identity theft, drug trafficking and computer hacking. The authorities also accuse him that he has operated BTC-e, a cryptocurrency exchange that allegedly enabled money-laundering. The Greek legal team of Vinnik denies that he ran the exchange and says he was an employee.
The UK airline company claims that it has already "closed off this unauthorised access" and contacted the customers with credit card details taken. Email addresses and travel details were accessed by the cyber-attackers, but not the passport records.
Criminals have released a screenshot of an alleged Madonna contract together with a demand for payment. In addition, the website of the law firm Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks, based in New York, is down. The firm has announced that clients have been notified and a cybersecurity company has been called in for help.
The Indonesian e-commerce platform Tokopedia has announced that " that there had been an attempt to steal data from Tokopedia users". The cybercrime monitoring firm Under the Breach has shared that hackers are allegedly offering the user data of 91 million compromised user profiles for around "$5,000 on the Darknet". The company itself has told the news agency Reuters that all transactions and payment methods would be still secure.