Friday, July 29, 2022

Imagine a hacker who thinks he is untouchable…

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/28/justice-department-data-breach-federal-court-system-00048485

Justice Department investigating data breach of federal court system

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) told fellow lawmakers that “three hostile foreign actors” attacked the U.S. Courts’ document filing system as part of a breach in early 2020 causing a “system security failure.” The comments — at a committee hearing on oversight of the Justice Department’s National Security Division — were the first public disclosure of the hack.

Nadler said the committee learned in March about the “startling breadth and scope” of the breach, which was separate from the SolarWinds hack revealed in late 2020. SolarWinds involved Russian government-backed hackers infiltrating the networks of over a dozen U.S. federal agencies for much of 2020, including the federal courts systems.



(Related)

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/29/us_judiciary_attack/

US court system suffered 'incredibly significant attack' – sealed files at risk

That incident may have exploited vulnerabilities in CM/ECF and "greatly risk compromising highly sensitive non-public documents stored on CM/ECF, particularly sealed filings."

Such documents are filed by the US government in cases that touch on national security, and therefore represent valuable intelligence.





A sign that organizations are taking ransomware seriously?

https://www.databreaches.net/ransom-payments-fall-as-fewer-victims-choose-to-pay-hackers/

Ransom payments fall as fewer victims choose to pay hackers

Bill Toulas reports:

Ransomware statistics from the second quarter of the year show that the ransoms paid to extortionists have dropped in value, a trend that continues since the last quarter of 2021.
Ransomware remediation firm Coveware has published a report today with ransomware data from the second quarter of 2022 showing that although the average payment increased, the median value recorded a significant drop.

Read more at BleepingComputer.



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