Computer law

Comcast Comcast, alongside several other big corporations, has recently suffered a devastating data breach. According to reports, it’s possible that hackers got their hands on the data of up to 36 million Comcast Xfinity customers, meaning the company’s cable television and internet department. Although the company is pretty tight-lipped about it, the data breach occurred over two months ago. Here’s what we know and what you should do to protect yourself. The hackers were able to access those masses of customer…

Insomniac Games Sony-owned studio Insomniac Games was hacked by a ransomware group, resulting in a leak of previously unknown details about Marvel’s Wolverine, as well as the studio and Sony’s future plans. Ransomware group Rhysida released around 1.67 terabytes of data obtained from Insomniac via a hack on Monday night, according to Cyber Daily. Reporting by Axios shows that the organization has a reputation for stealing personal information like Social Security numbers through cyberattacks on companies like…

Google has revealed that it’s suing alleged scammers who are offering malware-laden “generative AI” software called Bard — the same name as Google’s own generative AI tool. Google filed the lawsuit in a California court on Monday, accusing the Vietnam-based group of creating pages for social media sites — mainly Facebook — that include ads for “Bard” software. The web giant’s suit says the defendants are “three individuals whose identities are unknown who claim to provide, among other things, ‘the latest version’ of…

As hackers come up with new ways to attack, not even trustworthy names can be taken at face value. This time, a ransom-as-a-service (RaaS) attack is being used to impersonate a cybersecurity vendor called Sophos. The RaaS, referred to as SophosEncrypt, can take hold of your files — or even your whole PC — and requires payment to have them decrypted. Initially reported by MalwareHunterTeam on Twitter, the ransomware has now been acknowledged by Sophos. The initial thought was that this may have been a red team…

No one wants to fall victim to ransomware, but a new report from blockchain security firm Chainalysis claims that ransomware payments could be set for a record-breaking year, with criminals raking in close to half a billion dollars just seven months into 2023. According to the analysis, ransomware payments this year have totaled $449.1 million so far. That’s $175.8 million more than this time last year, suggesting that hackers have doubled down on this method of extracting money from unfortunate victims. Sora…

A British man who took part in a high-profile Twitter hack in 2020 was handed a five-year jail term by a New York federal court on Friday. Joseph O’Connor, 24, had pled guilty in May to four counts of computer hacking, wire fraud, and cyberstalking. He was also ordered to pay $794,000, the amount that he nabbed in the crypto crime. O’Connor was one of several men involved in the headline-grabbing ruse two years ago, which targeted more than 130 Twitter accounts, including ones belonging to politicians and celebrities…

A vulnerability in the MOVEit file transfer software has led to the infiltration of the personal records of millions of Americans across several states, according to Tech Radar. The exploit has targeted the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) in Louisiana and Oregon. MOVEit software is used globally by several organizations, including many government agencies, and the vulnerability’s code has been connected to several data breaches, the publication added. Andrew Brookes/Getty Images Approximately 6 million Louisiana…

Eyeing the increasing threat of damaging cyberattacks by hackers backed by hostile foreign states, the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) on Tuesday announced the creation of the National Security Cyber Section — aka NatSec Cyber — within its National Security Division (NSD). Hackers operating out of countries like China, Russia, and North Korea seek to cause disruption across a wide range of sectors, steal government and trade secrets, spy on targets, and raise revenue via extortion. Such nefarious activities have long…

Ransomware group BlackCat has claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on Reddit in February and is now demanding a $4.5 million payment to prevent it from publishing 80GB of data that it claims to have stolen from the site. But that’s not all, as the group, which is also known as ALPHV, is insisting that Reddit also reverse the API price changes that have caused so much controversy just recently. In a message posted by the group this week, the perpetrator said: “We are very confident that Reddit will not pay any…

Microsoft has shared some information about an outage that impacted its services earlier this month. The disruption affected the computer giant’s Azure cloud computing platform, along with Microsoft tools such as the Outlook email and OneDrive file-sharing apps. At the time, Microsoft said little about the incident, but in a post published over the weekend, it confirmed the cause to be distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, a malicious act that attempts to disrupt a server or network by overwhelming it with…