Threats to US Election Security Grow More Complex
Top U.S. election security officials say protecting the nation’s voting systems has become increasingly challenging.
Insider threats are a growing concern and could undermine serious strides made to secure voting systems — including migrating to hand-marked paper ballots and introducing reliable audits — since they were declared critical national infrastructure in January 2017.
The Top Data Breaches of 2022 so far
Every year, we become more aware of the dangers of cybercrime and data breaches. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that the number of incidents decreases – quite the contrary. The biggest challenge for organizations is not the number or type of attacks they face, but how to respond quickly enough to mitigate their damage before it’s too late.
Cybercrime is expected to cost companies worldwide upwards of $10.5 trillion by 2025. The attackers use sophisticated tools to penetrate systems and steal data from organizations of all sizes. Malicious actors will also use social engineering tactics to lure employees into giving them access to their systems without knowing it.
Utah Cookie Wars Highlight a Need to Protect Trade Secrets
There is a war happening in Utah, but rather than bullets, the combatants are using lawyers and freshly-baked cookies. The first shots were fired at the beginning of summer 2022 by Utah’s staple gourmet cookie shop Crumbl Cookies. In May, Crumbl sued two of its competitors in the cookie industry Dirty Dough Cookies and Crave Cookies, principally alleging that Dirty Dough and Crave are infringing on Crumbl’s trade dress and trademarks. These lawsuits gained substantial attention in local news outlets, including The Deseret News and The Salt Lake Tribune as well as on several social media sites who assigned the disputes the hashtag “#UtahCookieWars.”
Ex-Twitter Executive: Saudi Dissidents Should be Wary of Elon Musk Takeover
A former Twitter executive says that Saudi dissidents should consider dropping their use of the social media platform in light of the outside role that a prominent Saudi billionaire, with close ties to his country’s repressive government, has in the newly organized company under Elon Musk.
As part of the restructured firm, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal — chair of Kingdom Holdings and a public ally of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS — has emerged as the second-largest shareholder in Twitter, with a $1.89 billion stake in the company. That has raised new questions about what the Saudis, who notoriously infiltrated Twitter and stole personal data on dissidents several years ago, hope to get in return for their investment, according to Vivian Schiller, who served as chief of global news for Twitter from 2013 to 2014.
Dropbox Suffers Breach, 130 GitHub Repositories Compromised
Dropbox disclosed on Tuesday that it suffered a data breach involving threat actors stealing code from 130 repositories after gaining access to a GitHub account using employee credentials obtained in a phishing attack.
Dropbox believes the threat actors behind the attack are the same that targeted GitHub users in September by impersonating the code integration and delivery platform CircleCI, which Dropbox also uses for select internal deployments.
BEC Group Crimson Kingsnake Linked to 92 Malicious Domains
A business email compromise (BEC) group dubbed ‘Crimson Kingsnake’ has recently been spotted impersonating well-known international law firms to trick recipients into approving overdue invoice payments.
As outlined in a technical write-up by cloud email security platform Abnormal, 92 malicious domains of 19 law firms and debt collection agencies across the US, UK and Australia have been identified and linked to the threat actor.
