Lifeboat Foundation

After being hit by a ransomware attack, Massachusetts city New Bedford faced a payout demand of more than $5 million – one of the largest known ransoms ever.

After a ransomware attack slapped a hefty payout demand of $5.3 million on New Bedford, Mass., the city announced that it is instead opting to pick up the pieces and restore what it can from backups itself.

If the city had opted to pay, the payout would have been the largest known ransom payout for an attack yet.

Safeguarding passwords, credit card numbers or cryptographic keys in computer programs will require less computational work in the future. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Kaiserslautern and Saarbrücken have come up with a new technology called ERIM to isolate software components from each other. This allows sensitive data to be protected from hackers when the data is processed by online services, for example. The new method has three to five times less computational overhead than the previous best isolation technology, making it more practical for online services to use the technology. This was reason enough for USENIX, a US-American computing systems association, and Facebook to award their 2019 Internet Defense Prize to the researchers.

Computer programs are like a fortress. Just as a fortress is protected by thick walls, moats and iron gates, firewalls and other security technologies prevent cyber criminals from maliciously exploiting software apps. And just as one poorly guarded gate or a supposedly secret escape tunnel may allow besiegers to capture a castle, all hackers need is a small security gap to gain access to all components of a software. In the worst case, they can then get their hands on the data that grants them access to user accounts or even allow them to make credit card payments. For example, the Heartbleed bug in the widely used OpenSSL encryption software made user names and passwords of various online services and programs vulnerable to hackers.

In a rare feat, French police have hijacked and neutralized a massive cryptocurrency mining botnet controlling close to a million infected computers.

The notorious Retadup malware infects computers and starts mining cryptocurrency by sapping power from a computer’s processor. Although the malware was used to generate money, the malware operators easily could have run other malicious code, like spyware or ransomware. The malware also has wormable properties, allowing it to spread from computer to computer.

Since its first appearance, the cryptocurrency mining malware has spread across the world, including the U.S., Russia, and Central and South America.

Hacking the iPhone has long been considered a rarified endeavor, undertaken by sophisticated nation-states against only their most high-value targets. But a discovery by a group of Google researchers has turned that notion on its head: For two years, someone has been exploiting a rich collection of iPhone vulnerabilities with anything but restraint or careful targeting. And they’ve indiscriminately hacked thousands of iPhones just by getting them to visit a website.

Ransomware attacks have more than doubled this year, as criminals turn to powerful new forms of file-locking malware and additional attack techniques to conduct campaigns that are more lucrative than ever before.

In February, an artificial intelligence lab cofounded by Elon Musk informed the world that its latest breakthrough was too risky to release to the public. OpenAI claimed it had made language software so fluent at generating text that it might be adapted to crank out fake news or spam.

On Thursday, two recent master’s graduates in computer science released what they say is a re-creation of OpenAI’s withheld software onto the internet for anyone to download and use.

Aaron Gokaslan, 23, and Vanya Cohen, 24, say they aren’t out to cause havoc and don’t believe such software poses much risk to society yet. The pair say their release was intended to show that you don’t have to be an elite lab rich in dollars and PhDs to create this kind of software: They used an estimated $50,000 worth of free cloud computing from Google, which hands out credits to academic institutions. And they argue that setting their creation free can help others explore and prepare for future advances—good or bad.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is warning taxpayers about a snowballing email attack that uses messages pretending to be legitimate IRS communications. The end game for the effort is malware being installed on unsuspecting users’ machines; imposters may gain control of the taxpayer’s computer or secretly download software that tracks every keystroke, eventually giving them passwords to sensitive accounts, such as financial accounts.

The gambit starts with messages to taxpayers from email addresses that spoof legitimate IRS addresses. The emails contain a link to a spoofed IRS.gov website that displays fake details about the targeted recipient’s tax refund, return or account.

The fake emails have subject lines like “Automatic Income Tax Reminder” or “Electronic Tax Return Reminder.” They claim to contain a “temporary password” or “one-time password” to access the files purportedly needed to submit a request for a refund or for information. However, those files are actually just malware in disguise.

A new type of device could be made to hack enemy missiles in flight to disarm them or guide them away. With a neutrino hacking laser you could essentially hack any missile from almost anywhere.

As hackers lock up networks that power police forces and utilities, municipalities must operate with hobbled computer systems, and decide whether to pay ransoms.