Up to 1,500 companies were ensnared in the July attacks.

The university warned that remediation will be "a long haul — not an overnight solution."

The Boston Public Library (BPL) has disclosed today that its network was hit by a cyberattack on Wednesday, leading to a system-wide technical outage.

An attack in Vermont was a natural experiment.

Criminal hackers will try almost anything to get inside a profitable enterprise and secure a million-dollar payday from a ransomware infection. Apparently now that includes emailing employees directly and asking them to unleash the malware inside their employer's network in…

Taiwan-based NAS maker Synology has warned customers that the StealthWorker botnet is targeting their network-attached storage devices in ongoing brute-force attacks.

A view of software used to recover files encrypted by the WannaCry ransomware. (Oriental Image via Reuters Connect) In recent memory, ransomware has gone from major nuisance to international crisis…

Nice mini-glossary to start.

Finally, a use for math!
Winner of Best Song at the 2021 Pwnie Awards: https://pwnies.com/winners/

New tech songs drop first on Twitter: https://twitter.com/forrestbrazeal

Music and lyrics by Forrest Brazeal:
One day I asked my teacher, What use is math to me?
She answered: When you're older, some day my boy you'll see...
There's a world of computer systems out there
Full of valuable data and not secured with care
And you can make a fortune in ransomware...

With a little bit of math!
It's called encryption,
Just a little bit of math,
Cause a conniption;
Lock the data, hide the key;
They'll pay up eventually,
It's the power of math.

Ransomware is big now
Because it's organized
You can buy it as a service
And sell it for a prize
There's a whole world of tempting targets to hack -
Governments, hospitals, schools to attack
And they pay up in Bitcoin, hard to trace back;

`Cause it's just math!
We call it crypto!
Just a...actually a whole bunch of math
No need to tiptoe,
Hackers whisper, don't be nervous,
We take pride in customer service...

Well then I told my teacher, I'm feeling terrified;
How can we protect ourselves from all this cybercrime?
She said, Don't click weird links, or use "password123".
Make offline backups, invest in security.
And that's when I realized how screwed we might be...

Just do the math!
So many systems
If they all took a bath
Wouldn't we miss them?

Next time there's no meat or water or gas
And we slide a little closer to the day of wrath
You can blame IT, or some Russian sociopath
But personally, I blame math.

If you’re not already paying attention to the Kaseya ransomware incident, you should be.

I’ve talked about ransomware and extortion attacks on organizations for about a decade. I recently spent a year at Microsoft in Threat…

Exec summary and introduction, probably

The hackers behind a nascent strain of ransomware hit a snag this week when a security researcher found a flaw in the payment system and, he says, helped victims save $27,000 in potential losses. Stanford University student and security researcher Jack Cable got a call Wednesday from a family friend, who is a doctor, asking for help because cybercriminals had locked the doctor’s computer. The doctor was preparing to pay the ransom when Cable began looking at the hackers’ payment system, according to Cable. The hackers were demanding 0.01 Bitcoin, or roughly $550 at the time, to unlock the doctor’s files. Cable, who served as a cybersecurity adviser to the Department of Homeland Security during the 2020 election, realized that if he changed one letter from lowercase to uppercase in the “transaction ID” the hackers were using to track payments, the system mistook the input for a victim that had […]