Month: April 2020

Hackers are offering for sale over 267 million Facebook profiles for 500 Euros ($540) on dark web sites and hacker forums.

In early March 2020, security expert Bob Diachenko uncovered an Elasticsearch cluster containing more than 267 million Facebook user IDs, phone numbers, and names. The archive was left exposed online for anyone to access without authentication. According to Diachenko, the data is the result of an illegal scraping activity by hackers in Vietnam, abusing Facebook API to collect the huge trove of data. A few days later, a second server was exposed by the same criminal group. The data on this server is identical to the data on the first server, but the data includes 42 million additional records. The records did not include passwords.

Read more about it here.

Tech giant Google said the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic has led to an explosion of phishing attacks, where cybercriminals lure users into revealing personal data.

Google said it is blocking almost 100 million phishing emails per day. Over the past week, 18 million of them were COVID-19 related.

Many of the emails impersonate as if they are coming from the World Health Organization.

So far in 2020, Americans lost $12 million to cybercriminals capitalizing on COVID-19.

Google’s gmail is used by 1.5 billion people.

Read more about it here.

The town of Jupiter, Florida, was hit on March 21, 2020 by ransomware REvil/Sodinokibi.

The town announced on March 23 that serveral online services, including utility payments, plan submission systems and all town email accounts, were down as a result.

The town decided not to pay the ransom. Instead, it is restoring its files from backups.

At least four Florida cities reported 2019 ransomware attacks:

• Pensacola suffered a Dec. 7 attack that disabled its phone systems, email system, 311 customer service line and online payments for Pensacola Energy and the city’s sanitation services;
• Lake City, a city of about 13,000 residents 65 miles west of Jacksonville, paid 42 Bitcoins, between $460,000 and $480,000, to end a June cyber-attack;
• The village of Key Biscayne, a community of 13,000 east of Miami, reported a ransomware “security event” in June;
• Riviera Beach, a city of 35,000 in Palm Beach County, paid 65 Bitcoins – approximately $600,000 – in May to regain access to its computer systems.

Read more about it here.