1) According to a survey, Small and Medium Scale Businesses (SMBs) in the UK are being subjected to over 10,000 cyberattacks per day which could cost them £4.5 billion on an annual note. The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) survey which included SMBs from Scotland says that over 1 million businesses operating across the UK were being subjected to cyber attacks such as phishing, malware and payment frauds.
FSB survey specified in its report that organizations operating from North West and South West England and West Midlands were most likely to suffer cyber-attacks.
2) Going forward, in a study conducted by Comparitech on Android phones it was discovered that more than 21 separate anti-virus apps with over 28 million downloads were seen presenting attack paths and opportunities to threat actors looking to exploit vulnerabilities on the Android smartphones.
Khaled Sakr, a senior security researcher of Comparitech who took responsibility of testing each application along with his team came to the above-said conclusion after exploring various web management dashboards and back end services of diverse software. He said that most of the antivirus apps were seen granting malevolent permission to hackers as they were allowing them to embed smart trackers to know the whereabouts of cyber crooks.
BullGuard, Fotoable Super Cleaner, MalwareFox, NQ Mobile Security, Tap Technology Antivirus, Zemana Antivirus, Vipre Mobile, AegisLab were some of the vendors whose names were disclosed by Comparitech after survey.
3.) In a shocking revelation made by Proofpoint researchers, Chinese state-funded hacking group APT10 is alleged to be behind the infiltration of critical infrastructure of the United States.
The security team claims that Chinese hackers were seen bombarding the digital infrastructure of United States with spear-phishing campaigns targeting various utility employees with emails with subject-line as “National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES) and having content related to professional exam results. When probed the emails were found to be laced with “Lookback” malware embedded in the macros of Microsoft Word files.
4.) As the support for Microsoft Windows 7 will end by January’2020 and the security support for the obsolete Windows XP has already ended 5 years ago, a revelation made by a British minister says that more than one million NHS computers are vulnerable to cyber threats by using archaic software.
Cybersecurity Insiders have to notify a fact over here that the disclosure comes just 2 years after more than 40 NHS trusts were targeted by an international cyberattack campaign named WannaCry Cyber Attack which secured a loss of £92 million as recovery costs.
According to a statement released by a spokesperson from the health department, more than 2000 computers are still said to be operating on Windows XP and over a 30K of them are functioning on Windows 7.
Unless the government intervenes into the issue on a financial note, nothing much can be done to improve the situation says the minister who likes to report anonymously.
5.) The last news related to the Cybersecurity world is about public cloud platforms as Palo Alto Networks has discovered more than 34 Million vulnerabilities on the applications deployed on a public cloud.
California based Cybersecurity services provider says that its survey found that 29 million vulnerabilities were existing on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and 3.9 million were present on Google Cloud Platforms which could be exploited by hackers at any time. As per the firewall services provider the least vulnerable platform when it comes to cloud security happens to be Microsoft Azure as only 1.7 million vulnerabilities were detected on the platform.
