Can’t keep the ball out of the net: Another day, another hack with Manchester United announcing that they have been the victim of a cyberattack. Manchester United are being held to ransom for millions of pounds by cyber criminals who have crippled the club’s systems, Sportsmail can reveal. United have brought in a team of technical experts to contain the potentially ‘disastrous’ attack that was launched more than a week ago. But it’s understood the hackers still have United in their grip after the National Cyber Security Centre on Thursday night confirmed they are helping the club to resolve the crisis. Read more here.
All your ovum belong to us: U.S. Fertility, one of the largest networks of fertility clinics in the United States, has confirmed it was hit by a ransomware attack and that data was taken. The company was formed in May as a partnership between Shady Grove Fertility, a fertility clinic with dozens of locations across the U.S. east coast, and Amulet Capital Partners, a private equity firm that invests largely in the healthcare space. As a joint venture, U.S. Fertility now claims 55 locations across the U.S., including California. In a statement, U.S. Fertility said that the hackers “acquired a limited number of files” during the month that they were in its systems, until the ransomware was triggered on September 14. That’s a common technique of data-stealing ransomware, which steals data before encrypting the victim’s network for ransom. Some ransomware groups publish the stolen files on their websites if their ransom demand isn’t paid. Read more here.
Ya, pretty much sums it up: The last year — a harrowing period for the world economy because of the Covid-19 pandemic — was also marked by the rise of the underground market for selling access to corporate networks and a more than two-fold growth of the ‘carding’ market. Threat intel firm Group-IB reports that sales of access to compromised corporate networks grew four-fold over the last 12 months. The increase was driven, in part, by state-sponsored attackers joining this segment of the cybercriminal market as a means to monetize compromised access to corporate networks. In the first six months of 2020 alone, 277 offers of access to corporate networks were put up for sale on underground forums. Read more here.
