Month: November 2019

Livingston School District in New Jersey, US, was hit on November 21, 2019 by ransomware. This caused students to start their week 2 hours later, while the school’s administrators and staff were discussing how to handle the cyber attack.

The Livingston School District believes the breached data wasn’t further stolen or sold by attackers, but rather just locked. The district has 9 schools and about 6,000 students.

The amount and type of ransom requested, and whether it was paid, wasn’t disclosed.

As of this writing, most of the school district systems have been restored.

Read more about it here.

Macy’s started notifying some of its customers that it discovered a software skimmer on its web site, which was used by criminals to steal customer data.
The malicious software was discovered on October 15, 2019, and Macy’s believes the software skimmer was injected on October 7. The attackers injected it into the checkout page and the My Account wallet page of the macys.com website.
Information potentially accessed by the cybercriminals include: First Name, Last Name, Address, City, State, Zip, Phone Number, Email Address, Payment Card Number, Payment Card Security Code, Payment Card Expiration date if these items were typed into the webpage while on either the macys.com checkout page or in the My Account wallet page.
Read more about it here.

Researchers with the University of Michigan and the University of Electro-Communications (Tokyo) have devised a new technique, called “light commands,” to remotely hack popular voice assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Facebook Portal, and Google Assistant.

The “light commands” attack exploits a design flaw in the smart assistants microelectro-mechanical systems (MEMS) microphones. MEMS microphones convert voice commands into electrical signals, but researchers demonstrated that they can also react to laser light beams.

The researchers demonstrated how an attacker can inject arbitrary audio signals to the target microphone by aiming an amplitude-modulated light at the microphone’s aperture.

Read more about it here.