Kirk was executive editor for security and technology for Information Security Media Group. Reporting from Sydney, Australia, he created "The Ransomware Files" podcast, which tells the harrowing stories of IT pros who have fought back against ransomware.
Successful account takeovers are one of the most common ways that organizations end up with attackers in their systems. But strong authentication can thwart even the most clever phishing campaigns, says Brett Winterford, regional chief security officer for APJ at Okta.
Data breaches are tricky to cover, and we want to report on them in an ethical way. That requires picking what should be reported for informed public discourse but avoiding topics that may encourage attackers' efforts to shame victims into paying a ransom and anything resembling data dump voyeurism.
The arrest of a Ukrainian national long wanted on cybercrime charges in the U.S. shows that with much patience, law enforcement can nab suspects. A key member of the JabberZeus gang, which stole tens of millions of dollars, was arrested in Geneva.
Should Australia's Medibank health insurer pay extortionists to prevent the release of sensitive medical documents related to millions of Australians? There's no easy answer to remedying what is the most severe cybercriminal incident in Australian history.
Is Australia's data breach wave a coincidence, bad luck or intentional targeting? Maybe all three. But the security weaknesses that have led to the incidents are not exotic. And the people behind these attacks are most likely workaday cybercriminals, not top-level nation-state attackers.
Australia's data breach debacle expanded on Thursday. Cyber extortionists who attacked Australian health insurer Medibank provided proof of their hack of medical data. Also, stolen data from Australian wine retailer Vinomofo was put up for sale on a Russian-language forum.
What if you were hired for an office job but ended up negotiating with cybercriminals? There aren’t many rules around ransomware, but this is a story about one rule that was definitely broken. By the end, the path to the truth led to a place on the other side of the world where no one wanted to be.
The REvil ransomware gang's attack against the U.S. software company Kaseya in July 2021 is one of the largest and most intriguing ransomware attacks of all time. Here's the inside story of how the attack went down and how organizations recovered.
A newly released conversation between two members of the Conti ransomware gang reveals concern about the war in Ukraine and its potential to disrupt their lucrative extortion racket. The conversation took place just a day before a massive data leak exposed the gang's inner workings.
The Log4j vulnerability has underscored once again the widespread dependence on open-source software projects and the lurking risks. Patrick Dwyer of OWASP says such projects deserve more resources to avoid major security vulnerabilities.
Microsoft launched a four-year campaign on Thursday with community colleges in the U.S. aimed at recruiting hundreds of thousands of people into the field of cybersecurity. The goal is to fill an expected shortfall of 250,000 workers in cybersecurity, which Microsoft says means rising risk.
Weaknesses in the systems of ShapeShift, a U.K.-based cryptocurrency exchange, reveal how a North Korean-linked group laundered cryptocurrency that came from the WannaCry 2.0 attack. The issues undermined some protections in Monero, a cryptocurrency designed to provide a high degree of privacy.
At least 38 million records have been leaked by hundreds of online portals that were unwittingly misconfigured by organizations using Power Apps, a Microsoft service to quickly spin up web apps. Microsoft has now changed default settings for Power Apps to prevent inadvertent data exposures.
There's another twist in the REvil ransomware saga: A decryption key released Friday on a Russian-language cybercrime forum unlocks files encrypted in the attack against Miami-based software developer Kaseya. Why it was released, however, is unknown, and its utility at this point is questionable.
Ransomware actors have taken a page from the playbooks of tech support scammers of yore by guiding victims to download malware through persuasion over the phone. Microsoft says the technique is more dangerous than it first realized.
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