Johnson Controls Ransomware Attack: Data Theft Confirmed, Cost Exceeds $27 Million
Building technology giant Johnson Controls confirmed this week that the September 2023 ransomware attack resulted in the theft of data and the company said expenses associated with the incident exceed $27 million. In an SEC filing detailing its financial results for the last quarter of 2023, the company said the attack was discovered during the weekend of September 23, 2023. The incident involved unauthorized access to its systems, data exfiltration, and the deployment of file-encrypting malware. READ MORE...
Mother of all Breaches may contain NEW breach data
On January 23, 2024, we reported on the discovery of billions of exposed records online, now commonly referred to as the "mother of all breaches" (MOAB). Since then, the source of the dataset has been identified as data breach search engine Leak-Lookup. Prevention platform SpyCloud compared the MOAB data with its own recaptured dataset and found at least 94% of the data was either public, old, or otherwise widely-known. That leaves a lot of new records. READ MORE...
Fulton County Suffers Power Outages as Cyberattack Continues
As Fulton County in Georgia continues to experience a cyberattack and a power outage, government systems are offline, and it's unknown when they'll become operational again. Court filings, tax processing, and other services - including phone and Internet service, as well as the court system website - are reportedly also not functioning as usual. District Attorney Fani Willis, who indicted President Trump and 18 others in 2020, has been particularly affected by this cyberattack. READ MORE...
Delayed Ivanti patch arrives after weeks of exploitation
Ivanti released a long-awaited security patch for two vulnerabilities in Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure VPNs that have been exploited by a suspected nation-state threat actor since early December. The exploitation led to thousands of Ivanti devices being compromised and led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to issue an emergency directive for Federal Civilian Executive Branch Agencies to take immediate action. READ MORE...
Apple Patches Vision Pro Vulnerability as CISA Warns of iOS Flaw Exploitation
Apple has released the first security update for its new Vision Pro virtual reality headset just as the US cybersecurity agency CISA issued a warning regarding the exploitation of an iOS vulnerability. The first security update for Vision Pro, specifically for the visionOS spatial computing operating system powering the VR headset, addresses CVE-2024-23222, a WebKit vulnerability that allows arbitrary code execution through specially crafted web content. READ MORE...
FBI disrupts Chinese botnet used for targeting US critical infrastructure
The FBI has disrupted the KV botnet, used by People's Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored hackers (aka "Volt Typhoon") to target US-based critical infrastructure organizations. The threat actors used the KV botnet malware to hijack hundreds of US-based, privately-owned small office/home office (SOHO) routers and to hide their hacking activity towards "US and other foreign victims". READ MORE...
Nearly 4-year-old Cisco vuln linked to recent Akira ransomware attacks
Security researchers believe the Akira ransomware group could be exploiting a nearly four-year-old Cisco vulnerability and using it as an entry point into organizations' systems. In eight of security company TrueSec's most recent incident response engagements that involved Akira and Cisco's AnyConnect SSL VPN as the entry point, at least six of the devices were running versions vulnerable to CVE-2020-3259, which was patched in May 2020. READ MORE...
"Can it run Doom?" (Gut bacteria edition)
Here at Ars, we've covered versions of Doom running on everything from hacked printers to Windows' notepad.exe to a version running inside Doom itself. But these and the other many and varied examples of weird Doom platforms all lack the sheer biological oddness of a new model for displaying the game using a grid of E. coli bacteria. MIT graduate student Lauren Ramlan outlines a method for creating the quixotic Doom display in her final project paper for a Principles of Synthetic Biology class. READ MORE...
- ...in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signs the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
- ...in 1893, Thomas Edison finishes construction of the first motion picture studio, nicknamed the "Black Maria", in New Jersey.
- ...in 1942, comedian and medieval historian Terry Jones ("Monty Python's Flying Circus") is born in Wales, United Kingdom.
- ...in 1964, the Beatles have their first #1 hit single in the US with "I Want To Hold Your Hand."
