Lifeboat Foundation

WASHINGTON — The Steamship Authority of Massachusetts ferry service fell victim to a ransomware attack Wednesday, the latest cyber assault affecting logistics and services in the United States.

The Steamship Authority is the largest ferry service offering daily fares from Cape Cod to neighboring islands Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts, according to the company’s website.

“The Woods Hole, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Steamship Authority has been the target of a ransomware attack that is affecting operations as of Wednesday morning,” the company wrote in a statement, adding that customers may experience delays.

Microsoft has galvanised policy makers across seven Asia-Pacific markets, including Singapore and Indonesia, in a bid to facilitate the sharing of threat intelligence and resources amongst their respective public sector. The US software vendor says “collective” efforts across the region are critical in combating cybersecurity threats, which are inevitable in an increasingly interconnected world.

It noted that Asia-Pacific saw malware and ransomware attacks at higher frequencies, clocking 1.6 and 1.7 times higher, respectively. than the global average. Citing numbers from its 2019 threat report, Microsoft said developing markets such as Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka were most vulnerable to such threats that year.

It added that cybercrime not only resulted in financial losses and brought down operations, but also posed risks to national security and eroded trust in digital economies.

It might be days before production resumes after an “organized cybersecurity attack” affected some servers supporting JBS USA’s North American and Australian IT systems, officials said.

CANBERRA, Australia — Thousands of meat workers had no work for a second day on Tuesday after a cyberattack crippled the world’s largest meat processing company. A government minister said it might be days before production resumes.

JBS is also Australia’s largest meat and food processing company, with 47 facilities across the country including abattoirs, feedlots and meat processing sites. JBS employs around 11000 people.

Continue reading “Cyberattack hits world’s largest meat supplier” »

There are now at least 16 malware families designed to compromise Pulse Secure VPN products.

Engineers have designed a computer processor that thwarts hackers by randomly changing its microarchitecture every few milliseconds. Known as Morpheus, the puzzling processor has now aced its first major tests, repelling hundreds of professional hackers in a DARPA security challenge.

In 2017, DARPA backed the University of Michigan’s Morpheus project with US$3.6 million in funding, and now the novel processor has been put to the test. Over four months in 2020, DARPA ran a bug bounty program called Finding Exploits to Thwart Tampering (FETT), pitting 525 professional security researchers against Morpheus and a range of other processors.

The goal of the program was to test new hardware-based security systems, which could protect data no matter how vulnerable the underlying software was. Morpheus was mocked up to resemble a medical database, complete with software vulnerabilities – and yet, not a single attack made it through its defenses.

Android malware known as FluBot is continuing to cause mayhem across some European countries, and there is speculation that the threat actors behind it may decide to target other geographies, including the United States. Here’s why you should be vigilant, how FluBot operates, and how you can remove this Android nasty from your device.

It’s also worth noting that this advice will help you stay safe from other Android malware strains. In recent days, cybercriminals have begun to target Europeans with TeaBot (also known as Anatsa or Toddler), an Android malware family that uses exactly the same technique as FluBot to spread and to lure users into giving up their sensitive data. FluBot and TeaBot are detected by ESET products as variants of the Android/TrojanDropper. Agent family.

I could probably be described as a SpaceX enthusiast. I catch their launches when I can, and I’ve watched the development of Starship with great interest. But the side-effect of SpaceX’s reusable launch system is that getting to space has become a lot cheaper. Having excess launch capacity means that space projects that were previously infeasible become suddenly at least plausible. One of those is Starlink.

Starlink is SpaceX’s satellite Internet service. Wireless and cellular internet have helped in some places, but if you really live out in the sticks, satellite internet is your only option. And while satellite Internet isn’t exactly new, Starlink is a bit different. Hughesnet, another provider, has a handful of satellites in geostationary orbit, which is about 22000 miles above the earth. To quote Grace Hopper, holding a nearly foot-long length of wire representing a nanosecond, “Between here and the satellite, there are a very large number nanoseconds.”

Continue reading “Starlink: A Review And Some Hacks” »

The agency’s Digital Forensics Unit wants to “tame the cybersecurity research into measured, repeatable, consistent digital forensics processes.”

We have developed and tested a secure new computer processor that thwarts hackers by randomly changing its underlying structure, thus making it virtually impossible to hack.

Last summer, 525 security researchers spent three months trying to hack our Morpheus processor as well as others. All attempts against Morpheus failed.

This study was part of a program sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Program Agency to design a secure processor that could protect vulnerable software. DARPA released the results on the program to the public for the first time in January 2021.