Tag: cyberattacks

Technology

How Coronavirus Can Lead to a Boom in Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)

John Ejiofor / May 6, 2020

Image by Jhonatan_Perez from Pixabay APTs (advanced persistent threats) is another brewing pandemic that the world must take into account as we battle the coronavirus pandemic. Quite unlike the black-hat hacker who attempts to gain unauthorized entry into your system or network in an exploitation bid for malicious reasons, APTs perpetrators are inherently more dangerous.   None of these guys has any permission or authority to compromise your network, but they still find ways to do so. Their sole aim is to inflict damage by compromising your security systems, altering functions of websites, networks, and even to the extent of shutting down systems.  They place so much emphasis and effort in gaining access to your passwords, financial information, and other personal data. The coronavirus pandemic, unfortunately, has given them a great opportunity to practicalize their nefarious activities. However, while ordinary black hat hackers will go for the immediate gains and possibly let you off the hook to enjoy their spoil, the perpetrators of APTs are another ball game altogether. They are as the name portends, very persistent, canny, dangerous, and outrightly deadly. The coronavirus pandemic has completely thrown the world off balance and nobody is sure of anything, it’s novel and everything about it…

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Healthcare, Technology

Cybersecurity: The Flip Side of The Coronavirus Pandemic

John Ejiofor / April 30, 2020

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay There were insinuations that coronavirus was an accident from a laboratory in Wuhan that was studying bat coronaviruses and then spread to the public, though, this has been debunked by the WHO. If indeed it had been, then the persons behind the evil plan did not take a lot of things including the cybersecurity impact into cognizance. What would it have been like if, for an accident, the whole world was thrown into this mammoth amount of cybersecurity threats and attacks we have been experiencing? Sherrod DeGrippo, senior director of threat research and detection at Proofpoint was reported to have observed that the total volume of phishing emails and other security threats as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic now represents the largest coalescing of cyberattack types around a single issue that has been seen globally and maybe for a long time to come. Check Point Threat Intelligence, revealed that since January 2020, there have been over 4,000 coronavirus-related domains registered globally. While 3% of the websites were found to be malicious, an additional 5% are suspicious.  Check Point Threat Intelligence also pointed out based on hindsight that coronavirus-related domains are 50% more likely to be malicious…

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Technology

How to Win the Ever-Changing Threats of the Cyberwar

John Ejiofor / February 12, 2020

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay  Based on the volume, frequency, and dastardness of attacks launched by cybercriminals, it is no longer a hidden fact that the world is in for a cyberwar. The magnitude of the war has made it absolutely imperative that we must embark on building nation-level defenses to fight cyberwar.  It may have been a bit late already but it can never be an overstatement to say that nation-states should put their acts together, fashion out well-articulated cyber defense measures to be able to protect themselves from the most advanced threats ever seen. Looking at the strategies cybercriminals have employed in launching attacks we have experienced so far, we may be at the early stages yet.  It is a cyberwar  Cyber threats and cyberattacks did not just start to manifest yesterday, however, the worldwide gruesome WannaCry and NotPeyta ransomware attacks of 2017, brought cyberattacks to a new level altogether. As if that were not a notification that we the world is grappling with something very mammoth, the expanding levels of malware-related data breaches in 2018, are sheer warnings and realities of the increasingly critical, vulnerable, and fast-developing world of cybercrime we all live and conduct business activities in.  Governments, individuals,…

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Technology

Cybersecurity Measures That Could Have Stopped The Exposure of Four Billion Users’ Records

John Ejiofor / February 1, 2020

Image by Katie White from Pixabay In the face of the multiple waves of cyberattacks that governments, corporations, and individuals suffer almost on a daily basis, it’s very annoying to note that any form of information can still be left unguarded and unsecured despite all the cybersecurity measures that are readily available. That is why the news that personal data relating to 1.2 billion people, including email addresses, phone numbers, and LinkedIn and Facebook profile information, has been leaked online via an open and unsecured Elasticsearch server came as a shock. The said data was uncovered on 16 October 2019 by researchers Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia of threat intelligence platform Data Viper. Diachenko and Troia were able to access and download the data via a web browser without having to use an ordinary password or any other form of authentication. According to the researchers, the first dataset was discovered to contain, among other things, data on 1.5 billion unique individuals, a billion personal email addresses including work emails for millions of decision-makers in Canada, the UK, and the US, 420 million LinkedIn URLs, a billion Facebook URLs and IDs, over 400 million phone numbers and 200 million valid US mobile phone numbers.…

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Business

The Possible Fallouts From The U.S. And China’s Trade War

John Ejiofor / December 2, 2019

Just last June, there was a ray of hope at the G-20 meeting in Osaka, Japan with the announcement by the leaders of China and the United States that their trade war was thawing out. According to the U.S. President Donald Trump, the two countries had set negotiations “back on track.”  This led to the U.S jettisoning any idea of new tariffs on Chinese goods and also suspending the embargo placed on U.S. companies from trading with Huawei, the Chinese IT giant that the U.S has blacklisted. Nations across the globe heaved a sigh of relief, markets picked up, and the media was abuzz with “cease-fire” reports. But alas, it turned out to be a “false flag,” just like many diplomatic on and off between Beijing and Washington. The outcome of the “jigsaw puzzle” was to have the Trump administration increased tariffs on another $125 billion worth of Chinese imports in September.  It’s a war and there is no going back, China retaliated by announcing further tariffs on $75 billion worth of U.S. goods. Nobody knows how the U.S. will respond to this but there are feelers that further tariffs will be issued in December, in an attempt to possibly…

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Technology

Backdoor Encryption, An assault on Privacy

John Ejiofor / October 11, 2019

Facebook has certainly had its fair share of problems over the years, right from the Cambridge Analytica scandals to a host of other privacy issue related problems, which led to a lot of people deleting their accounts from the platform. Now that they have come up with a beautiful one, the end-to-end encryption that everybody should applaud, it’s a huge surprise that there is a concerted effort to stab privacy in the back through backdoor encryption. Salvos have been coming from all corners at end-to-end encryption. The surprising aspect of the whole thing is that these reactions are coming from largely unexpected quarters, that is those you thought would be very happy to fight cybercrime to a standstill.  The U.S. Attorney General William Barr in a reaction to the technology world says, “If the cops and Feds can’t read people’s encrypted messages, you will install backdoors for us, regardless of the security hit.” FBI head honcho Christopher Wray is not left out in the call for a backdoor, saying that the cops and Feds should be able to spy on end-to-end encrypted chats and the like. Also noteworthy is the fact that UK home secretary Priti Patel, US attorney general…

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