1.) In the first of the Cyber Attack news which is trending on Google, TalkTalk hacker who blackmailed the chief executive officer of the company Dido Harding has been jailed for 4 full years.
Daniel Kelley, from South Wales, was a black hat hacker who failed in GCSE grades and wanted to achieve something thrilling in the computer field. So, he started hacking the network of his college at first and then started to infiltrate the networks of Canada, Australia and the UK including the network of telecommunication giant consisting of 4 million customers.
Kelley is reported to have resorted to the crime due to Asperger’s Syndrome which led to depression and extreme weight loss. And his deeds are said to have brought over £77 million loss to TalkTalk in 2015-16.
2.) Moving on to the second news related to cyber attack and trending on Google, Auburn Food Bank of King County located in Washington has released an official statement yesterday that its servers fell prey to GlobeImposter 2.0 ransomware attack which disrupted the digital services required to maintain the charity.
FYI, Auburn Food Bank is a non-profit entity that distributes free food and supplies to families located in Auburn School District Boundary.
On June 5th this year the social service provider is said to fallen prey to a data encrypting malware at around 2 AM.
As the authorities did not pay the demanded ransom, data from the systems including the content from the email server was erased.
Now the plan is to use the backup data and rebuild the network and the files that have been lost.
News is also out that the hackers were demanding 1.2 bitcoins or $10,000 at current market value in exchange to the decryption key.
3.) Lake City which is a county in Columbia County of Florida, United States was recently targeted by “Triple Threat” cyber attack which combines 3 modes of attacks to target systems.
Authorities of the county have confirmed that all the digital systems of the county and email systems have become inoperable and most landlines have also gone out of order.
City personnel has started to work on alternative methods such as manual restoration of city services to a certain extent. All building permits and Utility payments are being made on hand as digital payment services have been stalled.
However, the police, fire, and other emergency services have remained intact.
4.) As per a report compiled by Cybersecurity company Rapid7, over 250 of Financial Times Stock Exchange(FTSE) Companies are vulnerable to over 35 different avenues of cyber attacks making them a soft target for hackers.
To put it in another way the digital infrastructure in such companies are exposed to hackers as they are either not properly configured or managed or patched and their defense line skills are also not up to the mark.
Since most of the companies operating in Britain use obsolete software such as Win XP and so are extremely vulnerable to hackers.
