The first news that is trending is associated with financial service provider PayPal. News is out that social security numbers of nearly 35,000 users were leaked in a cyber attack that could have emerged from a credential stuffing campaign launched by a state funded actor.
According to the update provided by a source from PayPal, the attack took place on December 6 and was identified at the end of last month. Preliminary inquiries revealed that information such as usernames, dobs and individual tax numbers of individuals was accessed by hackers.
However, on a positive note, none of the siphoned info was found misused and the payment systems remained intact with no compromise logins.
All affected customers will be contacted via email and victims will be provided with a theft monitoring service via Equifax for the next 2 years, says a source from the American multinational financial tech company.
Second is the news related to the government of Iran, whose servers have been targeted by a threat actor dubbed Backdoor Diplomacy between July and December 2022. Security firm Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 was the first to discover the digital invasion and has linked the threat linked to Chinese APT group.
MailChimp, the automation based marketing company, is the third to hit the news headlines on Google as its servers have become a victim of a social engineering attack that led to a data leak. According to the official statement from the company, the leak took place on January 11th,2023 through a tool exploit related to Mailchimp Customer Support and Account Administration.
Prima facie reveals the attack took place when hackers got hold of sensitive login info after compromising a computing device used by an employee and a contractor leading to info steal of employee credentials.
Cybersecurity Insiders have resources data from its sources that the attack led to info leak related to companies in cryptocurrency and finance business fields.
Fourth is the news related to Ransomware and is sure to bring in smiles on the faces of all of them who are against the crime and its money minting tactics.
According to an analysis carried by Chainalysis, blockchain technology-based firm that is into research, payments related to ransomware have decreased in the past few months witnessing roughly a drop of 40% from record-breaking $765 million to $456 million in the past two years.
This suggests that most of the victims in the past 16-20 months either failed to pay the ransom or openly confessed to the criminals that they do not want to bow down to their demands.
It is unclear whether the victims faced serious repercussions for denying a pay to the criminals. However, payment refusal also means that the targeted victims could recover their encrypted data by other means, like via backups or free decryption keys offered by many security firms these days.
Thus, it clearly suggests that the business of spreading file encrypting malware is not lucrative anymore. So, are the criminals going to shift their business focus to other means or will they intensify the malware to a new peak, will only be known with time.
