Information Technology Security

By Ionut Ilascu,  Bleeping Computer A faulty component in the latest CrowdStrike Falcon update is crashing Windows systems, impacting various organizations and services across the world, including airports, TV stations, and hospitals. The glitch is affecting Windows workstations and servers, with users reporting massive outages that took offline entire companies and fleets of hundreds of thousands of computers. According to some reports, emergency services in the U.S. and Canada have also been impacted. Worldwide outage By the time of the correction, though, many large organizations across multiple verticals had already been affected. Some reports say that CrowdStrike’s update impacted some 911 emergency service agencies in the state of New York (EMS, police, fire department), Alaska, and Arizona, as well as 911 services in parts of Canada. A 911 telecommunicator in Illinois said that they were “working off of paper until things come back.” There also reports that the health hotlin...

Plus: The Conti ransomware gang shuts down, Canada bans Huawei and ZTE, and more of the week’s top security news. By Matt Burgess, Wired As Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine heads towards its hundredth day, opposition from Ukrainian forces is as strong as ever. At the same time, hacktivists all around the world continue to breach Russian institutions and publish their files and emails. This week one hacktivist collective took a different—and slightly peculiar—approach: launching a service to prank-call Russian government officials. The new website uses leaked details to put two random Russian officials on a call with each other. It obviously won't make any difference to the outcome of the war, but the group that created it hopes the tool will cause some confusion and annoy those in Moscow. New research from Google’s Threat Analysis Group has delved into the surveillance-for-hire industry and found that spyware vendors are targeting Android devices with zero-day exploits. State...

By Bill Toulas,  Bleeping Computer The Spanish police have announced the arrest of 13 people and the launch of investigations on another seven for their participation in a phishing ring that stole online bank credentials. The threat actors used phishing lures to trick their victims into believing they received an alert from their bank and proceeded to steal their account credentials. Having access to banking accounts, the adversaries used their victims' money to make online purchases, direct transfers to "money mule" accounts, or request personal loans. The police say the threat actors stole at least 443,600 Euros ($466,000). from approximately 146 victims as part of these phishing attacks. "The operation, carried out in several phases between January 2019 and April of this year, has ended with the arrest of 13 people -and another 7 investigated but not detained- in A Coruña, Córdoba (5), Huelva, Madrid (2), Málaga, Murcia, Palma de Mallorca and Terrassa (Barcelona)....

'This is one of the most worrisome pieces of software I've ever seen,' says David Wright on 'Unfiltered' By  Fox News Cybersecurity expert Morgan Wright detailed the intent and capabilities of the spyware and citizen surveillance technology "Pegasus," calling it "worrisome" on Saturday's "Unfiltered with Dan Bongino." MORGAN WRIGHT: It's called zero-touch infection, and that's what it means, zero-touch. You don't have to do anything. They just have to have a little bit of information about your phone, maybe a phone number. Maybe they scan an area with another tool and identify all the phones that are there because they can get their unique ID numbers, and then they start targeting. They start figuring out who's moving, who's going in there. And I'll tell ya, Dan, it's not like a physical piece of equipment that if I took a gun away from you, you couldn't duplicate one just out of thin air. But if I to...