For months, hackers Yes targeting Iran’s public infrastructure, hitting everything from trains to gas stations to airlines. This seems like an escalation in longstanding tensions with Israel – one that shows just how impactful cyberattacks can have in the real world. In this case, those consequences are of particular concern because they are felt primarily by civilians.
In other regional news, spyware from Israel NSO Group is said to have been found on the phones of nearly a dozen US State Department officials. The victims are either living in Uganda or working on issues related to the country. The case shows how NSO Group has always streamlined its flagship surveillance product, although it remains unclear whether anything will curb the near-constant abuses committed by authoritarian governments. present or not.
Security researchers think they have found a better way to Spotted state-sponsored trolls on Reddit. Malicious apps designed to steal banking information sneak into the Google Play Store and was downloaded more than 300.00 times before being started. And a bug in the cryptocurrency service MonoX Finance allows hackers get rid of the 31 million dollar heist.
Facebook will ask the most at-risk users come set two-factor authentication on their account. As Android 12 rolls out to more devices, we’ve taken a look security settings you should check now. And the so-called watering hole attacks becoming more popular; We talked about what they are and why they are so insidious.
Finally, my apologies to Sport shoes, Hacker, and War games, but Matrix is the best hacker movie of all time.
And so much more! Each week, we compile all the WIRED security news not covered in depth. Click on the title to read the full story.
Between October 7 and October 19, a hacker gained access to the network of the Los Angeles outpost of Planned Parenthood and stole data related to 400,000 patients. The organization disclosed to victims that the information included not only their name, address and other identifying information, but also details about their procedure and prescription. While the news came the same week that the US Supreme Court had heard oral arguments in a case involving controversial Mississippi abortion laws, the hack itself appears to be related. ransomware rather than political motives.
We have written before about shortcomings of the so-called predictive policy, in which law enforcement uses data to guess where crimes will happen and who will commit them, and allocate resources accordingly. This week, new reports from Markup and Gizmodo show that these systems disproportionately affect Black and Latino neighborhoods. It’s a damn deep dive well worth your time.
Tor is a priceless anonymous tool relies on thousands of proxy servers to route encrypted traffic through. However, it turned out that a crook operated those hundreds of servers in a bad faith. Upon closer inspection, one researcher suspected that they were trying to gather information about people using the Tor network. The Tor project proceeded to remove the malicious servers from the network as they were reported, but at one point the threat agent ran up to 900 machines at a time.
Earlier this year, router maker Ubiquiti suffered a hack that one whistleblower was apparently attributed to outside hackers. Now, an indictment by the Justice Department alleges that the incident was actually an inside job, and that the accuser was in fact the attacker of them all. If the allegations hold, it’s an incredibly brazen sequence of actions and well worth taking a few minutes to sift through.
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