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Only three weeks ago, unknown persons had paralyzed the website of the Federal Election Commissioner. It had collapsed under the data load after a large number of calls from the Internet and was temporarily no longer accessible. Last week, a spokesperson assured that servers important for the federal election had not been affected, however. According to information from "Business Insider", another hacker attack apparently occurred this Wednesday. According to the report, the Federal Information Technology Center (ITZBund), the central IT service provider of the federal administration, classifies the event as a "major incident", i.e. a serious security event. According to Business Insider, software (web shell) was apparently installed on a so-called Confluence program of the Federal Statistical Office, whose head is also the Federal Election Commissioner. This enables external access to servers and file systems. How exactly this happened and whether data was leaked i...

 After the attack on the IT company Kaseya in July 2021, the master key for the locked data came from the FBI - but with a delay. Several hundred companies are affected in July 2021 when the hacker group Revil exploits a vulnerability of the IT service provider Kaseya: Using malware, data on the hard drives of numerous customers is encrypted. The extent of the attack is particularly obvious in Sweden, where almost all branches of the supermarket chain Coop have to be temporarily closed. The attackers' ransom demand for decrypting the locked data: 70 million US dollars (about 59 million euros) in the digital currency Bitcoin. Kaseya attack: FBI waited almost 3 weeks to hand over keys A few weeks after the attack, a "trusted third party" plays a master key to Kaseya; whether the company had to pay for it, and if so, what sums, remains open. Now it should be clear who that third party was and why hacked customers had to wait nearly three weeks for redemption from their threa...

New figures show how hacker attacks are affecting the German economy. The amount of damage has jumped due to Corona - and the nature of the attacks has changed. Computer hackers have increasingly targeted the German economy. Since the beginning of the Corona crisis, for example, not only has the number of attacks by cybercriminals on local companies, research institutes, associations and institutions increased significantly. The total amount of damage has also increased by leaps and bounds. At 223 billion euros a year, it is currently more than twice as high as in 2018 and 2019. Nearly 90 percent of the one thousand companies and organizations surveyed in a representative poll conducted by the Berlin-based digital association Bitkom said they had been hit by attacks from the Internet - worse than ever before. In the two years before the Corona crisis, "only" 75 percent of companies saw themselves in the crosshairs of cybercriminals. At the time, the damage was estimated at ar...

The German economy finds itself in a threatening situation. According to the Federation of German Industries, the number of cyberattacks has increased during the pandemic. The main reason is working from the home office. German companies are more of a target for criminal attacks than ever before, according to the Federation of German Industries (BDI). "German business has never been attacked as much as it is today," Matthias Wachter, head of security at the BDI, told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. "The number of attacks has increased further in the Corona pandemic because companies are even more vulnerable in the home office." Representatives of security authorities and associations confirm the development.  "The threat situation remains very tense and has been exacerbated by the pandemic," according to the report from the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). "Cyber attacks with extortion software play a major role in this." Part...

After various hardware modifications, an expert has now also been able to manipulate the software of the trackers. Moreover, stalking via the item trackers is "frighteningly easy". Ten days after the official launch, security researcher Stack Smashing has managed to hack the accessory. He tweeted that he was able to break into the micro-controller and manipulate its software. The controller controls the device. For example, the German was able to change the NFC URL and make the item tracker open a different domain instead of the "find-my" website. A phishing page or similar could then be hidden behind it. Other specialists wonder about the fact that the firmware of the Airtags (test) is not encrypted. The hack is also called a jailbreak. Airtag stalking too easy thanks to security weaknesses Another report in recent days also criticized Apple's anti-stalking measures as inadequate. After testing them, Washington Post editor Geoffrey Fowler wrote, for example, ...

A horror scenario has occurred in the US: Cyber criminals have shut down one of the country's largest pipelines. The White House is alarmed, gasoline prices are rising. And criminals with a Robin Hood image are behind the attack. But this matter is now getting too hot for them. Nothing works anymore. After one of the most devastating cyberattacks known to date, the operation of one of the largest gasoline pipelines in the United States has been suspended until further notice. At the end of last week, the operator Colonial Pipeline was attacked with ransomware. In such attacks, hackers smuggle ransomware into the IT systems of their victims, encrypt their data - and then demand a ransom for its release. For four days now, neither the company nor the experts and U.S. authorities involved have managed to get the system up and running again. The government of Joe Biden (78) has now classified the case as a top priority, several ministries have been called in via a task force, and a reg...

Hackers have apparently exploited a huge security hole at Microsoft. US media report attacks on 30,000 systems in the US alone. Among others, research on infectious diseases and companies with defense contracts were of particular interest. According to U.S. media, tens of thousands of corporate, government and educational email servers have fallen victim to hacker attacks. A security update for the vulnerability in Microsoft's Exchange Server software has been available since last Wednesday. However, it must be installed by customers. On Friday, the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) urged thousands of German companies to quickly plug the gap. Reports differed widely on the number of people affected. There could be more than 250,000 victims worldwide, the Wall Street Journal wrote, citing an informed person. A former U.S. official familiar with the investigation told the financial service Bloomberg that at least 60,000 email servers were known to have been affecte...