Industry News: ESG5

2019-05-08

CNBC: Hackers have stolen over $40 million worth of bitcoin from Binance, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, the company said on Tuesday. Binance said the hackers ran off with over 7,000 bitcoin and used a variety of attack methods to carry out the "large scale security breach" which occurred on Tuesday...

2019-05-09

FinancialPost: A federal grand jury has indicted two members of “extremely sophisticated” hacking group operating from China in the 2014-2015 theft of the personal information of nearly 79 million customers of insurer Anthem Inc., the biggest known health care hack in U.S. history. The Justice Department said the two also hacked three other U.S.-based companies it did not name, one in the technology sector, the others in basic materials and communications...

2019-05-08

CNBC: A malware attack on Wolters Kluwer, a popular tax and accounting software platform, has left many in the accounting world unable to work this week and sparked concerns about the security of the tax return and financial information stored on the company's cloud servers. Wolters Kluwer provides software and services to all of the top 100 accounting firms in the U.S., 90% of top global banks and 93% of Fortune 500 companies, according to its web site. Many of its tax and accounting services...

2019-05-08

Bloomberg: Amazon.com Inc. said it was hit by an "extensive" fraud, revealing that unidentified hackers were able to siphon funds from merchant accounts over six months last year. Amazon believes it was the victim of a "serious" online attack by hackers who broke into about 100 seller accounts and funneled cash from loans or sales into their own bank accounts, according to a U.K. legal document. The hack took place between May 2018 and October 2018, Amazon’s lawyers said in a redacted filing from November that can now be made public...

2019-05-07

Forbes: Financial institutions face a complex array of threats — from the immediate such as synthetic identities which have been used to defraud individual firms multiple times. But they also should be looking around and ahead, said Valerie Abend, managing director, Accenture Security and co-author with Howard Marshall, principal director at Accenture Security, of a report entitled “Extreme but Plausible Threat Scenarios In Financial Services.”...

2019-05-07

Cointelegraph: The French stock markets regulator AMF has seen over a 14,000% surge in enquiries related to fraudulent crypto offers in 2018 as opposed to 2016, the agency wrote in a new annual report released May 7. In the report, the Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF) specified that the number of enquiries associated with crypto-related scams online has surged to over 2,600 in 2018 from only 18 similar enquiries back in 2016...

2019-05-03

SydneyMorningHerald: Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's handpicked cybersecurity tsar Alastair MacGibbon is quitting his role and has declared cyber attacks "the greatest existential threat we face". Mr MacGibbon has been the face of cybersecurity for federal authorities for the past three years, handling the public response to the cyberattack on the national census in 2016 and the hacking earlier this year of the Parliament and the major political parties...

The target: Home Depot, an American home improvement retailer.

The take: 53 million e-mail addresses and 56 million credit and debit accounts.

The attack vector: Beginning in April 2014 and lasting several months, attackers used compromised credentials belonging to a third-party vendor to initially breach Home Depot’s network. Once inside, they exploited unpatched Windows vulnerabilities and installed malware on self-checkout registers to skim customer information.

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2019-04-30

BankInfoSecurity: A Russian citizen has been charged with stealing more than $1.5 million from the Internal Revenue Service after hacking into tax preparation companies and stealing personal data. On Monday, an indictment was returned in U.S. federal court against 33-year-old Anton Bogdanov, aka "Kusok," charging him with wire fraud conspiracy, aggravated identity theft and computer intrusion. Prosecutors have accused Bogdanov of working with unnamed accomplices to steal personal information and use it to file federal tax returns and fraudulently obtain tax refunds...

2019-05-01

TheSun: THE mastermind behind Britain's biggest ever cyber scam splurged £3m on Harrods shopping sprees, parties with popstars and luxury holidays to Dubai, a court heard. Feezan Hameed Choudhary, 28, was jailed for 11 years in 2016 for leading a "vishing" fraud which conned 750 RBS and Lloyds customers out of £113m. "Vishing" or "voice phishing" is a type of phone fraud in which the scammer manipulates the victim into sharing private financial information which can then be used to make cash transfers...