As we reach the end of the month of August, we bring you our top 5 cyber security news circulating the digital world this month. We promise it will be over in 5 minutes.
01 Healthcare A Popular Target For Hackers
Not long after the high profile SingHealth hack, Hong Kong’s Department of Health was affected with ransomware, leaving files stored on the affected computers encrypted. An email address was given to contact for a decryption, however, no ransom was demanded. Authorities were more worried of the safety of sensitie medical data, which could be manipulated. On a similar note, the first hearing for the SingHealth hack happened on the 29th August, which aims to discover the factors leading to the breach and ways to improve cyber security incident response in the future.
Image source: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/singapore-medical-data-hack-hong-100543796.html
02 Love for Apples
A 16 year old Australian teen hacked into Apple’s computer system, multiple times over a year as he claims to be a fan of the company and “dreamed” of working there. He managed to avoid detection until a physical raid of his parent’s home, where the police discovered stolen files and instructions in a folder simply named “hack hack hack”. The teen was reported to plead guilty and scheduled for sentencing in September 2018.
Image source: Bloomberg
03 Unfruitful outcome between ASEAN and Russia
A proposed agreement by leaders in ASEAN on a cyber security agreement with Russia did not work out after the the 51st ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Singapore. Coincidently, Russia has been recently accused of interfering with the U.S. elections in cyber security. With the recent attacks in Singapore and ASEAN, it did not come as a surprise that cyber security became the major discussion.
Image source: www.asean2018.sg
04 Indian Bank reported $13.5M unauthorised withdrawals after FBI warnings on global ATM cashout
Shortly after a “ATM cashout” scheme warned by the FBI, India based Cosmos Bank reported that its servers has been broken into, with nearly $2M in fraudulent bank transfers and $11.5M aunthorised cash withdrawals reported across 20 countries. However, none of the transactions have been debited from customer’s account and the savings, term deposits and recurring accounts of depositors are safe as the malware attack happened on the “switch” and not on the Core Banking System (CBS) of the bank where it receives debit card payment requests via a “switching system”.
05 Power over encryption
Australia has proposed a cyber legislation to authorities greater access to content on smartphones in an attempt to crack down on Australians misusing encrypted services to avoid law enforcements. The new law will target communication providers and device makers that will have the power to force companies to reveal encrypted information.
Written by: Liwen Woon