Industry News: ESG5

2019-06-27

Standard: A member of the philanthropic Sackler dynasty fell victim to cyber criminals who hacked into his email account in an attempt to steal more than £3 million. Michael Daniel Sackler, a film producer, was targeted in January 2015 when fraudsters took control of his emails and made a string of bogus payment requests to his bank.The thieves mocked-up false invoices with their own bank details, making three transfers totalling £1.3 million out of Mr Sackler’s account...

2019-06-26

Bank Info Security: Six suspects have been arrested as part of an international police investigation tracing the theft of at least $28 million worth of bitcoin cryptocurrency. Police allege that the fraudsters created look-alike sites for the Blockchain.com cryptocurrency exchange - and perhaps others - and tricked users into visiting them by making fraudulent Google Adwords buys that led Google search users to the spoofed sites...

2019-06-25

Bloomberg: Cyber attackers that appear linked to the Chinese government infiltrated at least 10 global telecommunications carriers over several years and stole customer data, a Boston-based research firm said. There is a “high degree of certainty” that a team acting on behalf of China was involved and sought to take communications data related to specific individuals, Cybereason said in a June 25 report. The breach involved tools and techniques consistent with those used by a group identified as APT10, it said...

2019-06-20

Business Insider: Cybersecurity is a growing threat for global financial institutions, yet most of them are ill-prepared to respond within their current infrastructure, according to new report. The cost of dealing with a cyberattack’s aftermath is particularly high for wealth managers and banks, Boston Consulting Group found in its annual report on global wealth-management trends. ...

The target: Desjardins Group, a Quebec-based federation of credit unions.

The take: Personal information for more than 2.7 million individuals and more than 173,00 businesses, potentially including name, date of birth, social insurance number, address, phone number, e-mail address, and ‘details about banking habits’.

The attack vector: Desjardins announced that the breach was not the result of an external cyberattack, but was the result of ‘unauthorized and illegal use of its internal data by an employee who has since been fired.’.

Read more...

2019-06-20

CNN: The Guardian says that it was warned earlier this year about efforts by a cybersecurity unit in Saudi Arabia to "hack" its computer networks. The British newspaper published an article on Wednesday that says it was alerted by a source in Riyadh that it was being targeted by the unit following the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It later received a copy of a document that supported the claim. According to the newspaper, which said it could not verify its authenticity, the memo authorized "the penetration" of its servers and accounts belonging to two of its reporters...

2019-06-18

BusinessInsider: 2018 was a great year for cybercrimes, and it doesn’t look like the numbers are going to fall anytime soon. A report by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) has revealed that a total of 6,179 cybercrime cases were reported in 2018, an increase from 5,351 in 2017. The report, released on Monday (June 17), revealed that cybercrimes accounted for about 19 per cent of the overall crime in Singapore last year...

2019-06-18

Globe Newswire: The nerve center for electric power transmission in California says that cyberattacks now pose the most serious threat to the grid. According to a June 14 report in the San Diego Union-Tribune, the California Independent System Operator (ISO) is fighting off several millions of attempted intrusions every month. Hubert Hafner, the California ISO’s head of cyber security, said his network is “in the cross-hairs of terrorists and nation-states that want to harm the electric grid.”...

2019-06-18

BBC: Russia has said it is "possible" that its electrical grid is under cyber-attack by the US. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said reports that US cyber-soldiers had put computer viruses on its electrical grid was a "hypothetical possibility". His comments came in response to a New York Times (NYT) story which claimed US military hackers were targeting Russian power plants. The report drew scepticism from experts and a denunciation by President Trump...

2019-06-17

ZDNet: Australian Catholic University (ACU) has confessed that a data breach occurred on its systems as a result of a phishing attack. ACU said it discovered the breach on 22 May but did not say when the attack happened. "The data breach originated from a phishing attack: An email pretending to be from ACU tricking users into clicking on a link or opening an attachment and then entering credentials into a fake ACU login page," Acting Vice-Chancellor Dr Stephen Weller said in a blog post on Monday...