1.) The top news that is trending on Google is related to a cyber-attack campaign that targeted about 21 natural gas suppliers in the United States, just a few days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The targeted companies were those involved in fuel production, export, distribution of natural gas and the aim behind the incident could be to create a kind of scarcity of gas supply in the developed nation. Now, the suspicion finger is pointing towards a Russian state-funded hackers group.
2.) Another news that is trending is related to the Conti Ransomware gang’s source code leak by a Ukrainian security researcher. The white-hat hacker leaked the source code not only to help companies from the west protect their systems from the file-encrypting malware invasions by hacking gangs funded by Kremlin intelligence but to retaliate to the Putin’s war ambition to take over Kyiv. According to VirusTotal’s recent survey, the average ransom demand made by Conti members is $765,000 and might soon reach a double-digit figure in millions, as it follows a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) business model.
3.) Third is the news related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alert issued against AvosLocker Ransomware that is targeting the critical infrastructure of the United States. Reports are in that those spreading AvosLocker were only targeting organizations operating in Finance, manufacturing, and government facilities and are demanding $5 million as a ransom on an average.
4.) Exotic Lily is a newly formed a hacking group that is trending on the cyber attack news headlines of Alphabet Inc’s subsidiary and a recent study made by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) states that the hacker’s gang is indulging in a massive phishing campaign and is into the distribution of malware.
Initially, Exotic Lily was acting as a mediator to purchase Diavol and Conti Ransomware, but now it has changed its earning tactics and is seen working for Russian intelligence-backed hacking groups dubbed FIN12 and Wizard Spider and is seen targeting the critical infrastructure of firms operating in North America and the United Kingdom.
5.) TransUnion South Africa, which operates in over 8 African countries, is in news for the wrong reasons. Information is now out that a hacking group interestingly dubbed as “N4ughtys@xTU” has stolen about 4TB of data from one of the servers and is threatening to release the data onto the dark web if their ransom demand is not entertained. The stolen information includes data belonging to 54 million customers mainly from South Africa and was stolen through a brute force attack. Unconfirmed sources claim that the server was being guarded by an authentication code dubbed “Password” and so hackers took control of the server very easily to break into the files storing sensitive information.
6.) Last, but not least, is the news related to an accidental data leak of about 40,000 London voters, that happened through an email blunder. As per the sources, the electoral services department of Wandsworth Council in southwest of London sent regular emails to its populace regarding any changes to be made to their household electoral data. But because of some errors made by the email admin, some households received sensitive details of people who were not residing in their household, leading to data leaks such as names, addresses, and voting instructions. The department has now issued an apology and claimed that the error occurred because of a data merging blunder that occurred during data migration.
