Cyber Defense Advisors

Year: 2024

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  • April 30, 2024

Man Who Mass-Extorted Psychotherapy Patients Gets Six Years

A 26-year-old Finnish man was sentenced to more than six years in prison today after being convicted of hacking into an online psychotherapy clinic, leaking tens of thousands of patient therapy records, and attempting to extort the clinic and patients. On October 21, 2020, the Vastaamo Psychotherapy Center in Finland became the target of blackmail […]

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  • April 30, 2024

WhatsApp in India

Meta has threatened to pull WhatsApp out of India if the courts try to force it to break its end-to-end encryption. Tags: encryption, India, Meta, privacy, WhatsApp Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.  

Cyber News
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  • April 30, 2024

U.S. Government Releases New AI Security Guidelines for Critical Infrastructure

The U.S. government has unveiled new security guidelines aimed at bolstering critical infrastructure against artificial intelligence (AI)-related threats. “These guidelines are informed by the whole-of-government effort to assess AI risks across all sixteen critical infrastructure sectors, and address threats both to and from, and involving AI systems,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Monday. […]

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  • April 30, 2024

New U.K. Law Bans Default Passwords on Smart Devices Starting April 2024

The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is calling on manufacturers of smart devices to comply with new legislation that prohibits them from using default passwords, effective April 29, 2024. “The law, known as the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure act (or PSTI act), will help consumers to choose smart devices that have been designed […]

Cyber News
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  • April 29, 2024

FCC Fines Major U.S. Wireless Carriers for Selling Customer Location Data

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today levied fines totaling nearly $200 million against the four major carriers — including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon — for illegally sharing access to customers’ location information without consent. The fines mark the culmination of a more than four-year investigation into the actions of the major carriers. In […]

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  • April 29, 2024

Google Prevented 2.28 Million Malicious Apps from Reaching Play Store in 2023

Google on Monday revealed that almost 200,000 app submissions to its Play Store for Android were either rejected or remediated to address issues with access to sensitive data such as location or SMS messages over the past year. The tech giant also said it blocked 333,000 bad accounts from the app storefront in 2023 for […]

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  • April 29, 2024

China-Linked ‘Muddling Meerkat’ Hijacks DNS to Map Internet on Global Scale

A previously undocumented cyber threat dubbed Muddling Meerkat has been observed undertaking sophisticated domain name system (DNS) activities in a likely effort to evade security measures and conduct reconnaissance of networks across the world since October 2019. Cloud security firm Infoblox described the threat actor as likely affiliated with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) […]

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  • April 29, 2024

Whale Song Code

During the Cold War, the US Navy tried to make a secret code out of whale song. The basic plan was to develop coded messages from recordings of whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals. The submarine would broadcast the noises and a computer—the Combo Signal Recognizer (CSR)—would detect the specific patterns and decode them on […]

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  • April 29, 2024

Navigating the Threat Landscape: Understanding Exposure Management, Pentesting, Red Teaming and RBVM

It comes as no surprise that today’s cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, […]

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