Dyn Gets DDoS’ed
So, yeah. Dyn had a bad day on Friday as they were the victim of a massive DDoS attack. It’s likely that this is another DDoS using IoT devices to flood a service. It seems that I did not just imagine my toaster telling me, “My birth cry will be the sound of every <I.T. helpdesk> phone on this planet ringing in unison” last night. I am going to have a stern conversation with it when I get home from work and cancel my order of the internet connected bidet. No good can come from that. In the meantime I have dealt with the lack of Twitter by writing short notes on mini post-its and sticking them to the outside window of my office. I have very important things to say after all.
India Has Some Banking Stuff Going Down
Axis Bank, the third largest private bank in India, dodged a bullet when Kaspersky Lab was nice enough to give them a call to let them know that a bad guy was in the system. It looks like they caught it quickly and no funds were lost. While it’s akin to another person telling you your fly is open, it beats having your pants fall off completely.
India’s largest bank, the State Bank of India (SBI), announced it had blocked over 600,000 debit cards used at non-SBI ATMs, which the bank suspects were infected with ATM malware. This incident seems to be related to malware found on another ATM network last month. While good in practice, it might have been wise to tell people they were doing it. It seems a few folks were kind of caught off guard when they suddenly couldn’t pay for stuff. Always an awkward feeling.
KnowBe4 Blogged About a Cool Phish
If you want to see a pretty complex attack, check out the blog. It was done by simulating a forwarded Microsoft patch notification message to some users. Pretty convincing really and has a twist at the end.
London is Being Targeted by Ransomware
It seems London is the European place to be for the Ransomware elite. At least they are certainly trying hard to get there. According to Malwarebytes, London had 670% more ransomware attacks than the #2 target, Manchester. Lord Voldemort was unavailable for comment.
While London is my favorite city in the world, what with its annual Christmas alien invasions, car melting buildings and now this, it seems a downright dangerous place to live.
A Brit Gets Another Year Older
In what might be the most important news of the week, Javvad Malik (@J4vv4D) is another year older today. When you reach his age, each birthday is worthy of great celebration. Happy Birthday to you Javvad.
Some Bad Guys Get Nabbed
2 Romanian citizens got prison time for laundering money made with the Dridex banking trojan. One of them received almost years and the other 7 years in prison. This historic event is expected to reduce Dridex-related cybercrime by a whopping, “NOT AT ALL”. Oh well. A token victory is still a victory.
ICANN has Completely Lost Its Mind
ICANN has decided that having domain names ending in such things as .EXE, .PDF, .DOC, etc. is just fine. I believe they have been sniffing the glue again. This is such a bad idea, it is mind blowing. Go home ICANN, you are obviously drunk.
Erich Kron is the Security Awareness Advocate at KnowBe4, and has over 20 years’ experience in the medical, aerospace manufacturing and defense fields. He is the former security manager for the US Army 2nd Regional Cyber Center-Western Hemisphere.