This week’s Cyber Security Headlines – Week in Review is hosted by Rich Stroffolino with guest Steve Person, CISO, Cambia Health
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175 million Amazon customers now use passkeys
Amazon announced Tuesday, that over 175 million customers are using passkeys since the company rolled the feature out about a year ago. Passkeys are digital credentials tied to biometric controls or PINs and stored within a secure chip on devices such as phones, computers, and USB security keys. One drawback of passkeys is that they are not portable, meaning you can’t transfer them between devices or password managers. However, that limitation is about to be addressed as the FIDO alliance has just announced a new specification that makes passkeys portable across different platforms and password managers. The FIDO Alliance estimates that 12 billion online accounts are now secured using passkeys. FIDO added that, by using passkeys over passwords, phishing has been reduced, and credential reuse eliminated, while making sign-ins up to 75% faster, and 20% more successful than passwords or passwords plus a second factor.
(Bleeping Computer and ZDNet)
Nearly 400 U.S. healthcare institutions hit with ransomware over past 12 months
On Tuesday, Microsoft released a report revealing that between July 2023 and June 2024, 389 U.S.-based healthcare institutions were successfully hit with ransomware. The attacks caused network and system outages, delays in critical medical operations and rescheduled appointments. Microsoft customers reported a 2.75x increase in human-operated ransomware encounters. The researchers said that the motives of Russian, North Korean and Iranian cybercriminals appear to have shifted from destruction to financial gain. The report did yield some positive news, showing that the percentage of ransomware attacks that reached the encryption stage has decreased significantly over the past two years.
(The Record and The Register)
Hong Kong police bust fraudsters using deepfakes in romance scams
Hong Kong police have arrested 27 people for allegedly carrying out romance scams using deepfake face-swapping technology. The scheme amassed roughly $46 million from victims in Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, India and Singapore. Authorities said the scammers made contact with victims via social media platforms and lured them in using AI-generated photos of attractive individuals. They then turned to deepfake technology when victims requested video calls. Police seized computers, mobile phones, luxury watches and over $25,000 in suspected crime proceeds from the operation’s headquarters.
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Infamous hacker USDoD possibly arrested in Brazil
Law enforcement officials in Brazil have arrested a hacker, allegedly behind intrusions on their own systems, who may have quite the record of achievement. This may be the person responsible for some recent high-profile cyberattacks including the FBI’s InfraGard platform in December 2022, Airbus in September 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in April of this year, and the huge data haul of National Public Data last December. Brazil’s Department of Federal Police has not named the person they have arrested, but has said this person was responsible for the EPA attack, and the individual has separately claimed such achievements. Furthermore, the recent filing bankruptcy by National Public Data that explicitly names USDoD, noted that the hacker “has had a great deal of success breaching other institutions including the FBI, Airbus, and TransUnion.”
Anonymous Sudan masterminds indicted
This past Wednesday, a federal grand jury unsealed an indictment against two Sudanese brothers aged 22 and 27, who are allegedly behind the cybercriminal outfit, which has been active over the past couple of years and quite infamous, to the point that the group was suspected of being a front group for the pro-Russia hacktivist collective Killnet. “It is known to have conducted a record 35,000 DDoS attacks in a single year, including those that targeted Microsoft’s services in June 2023.” Authorities also unsealed a criminal complaint and announced they had disabled the group’s powerful tool for conducting attacks. Experts, including Tom Scholl, vice president of Amazon Web Services who were instrumental in the takedown, said his team were “a bit surprised about how brazen they were, and by the ease with which they were impacting high profile targets.”
(Cyberscoop and The Hacker News)