Planning for ransomware...

https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/city-pays-ransom-despite-pre-ransomware-outbreak-hack-alert-a-14427

City Pays Ransom Despite Pre-Ransomware Outbreak Hack Alert

… Ten days after receiving an alert that hackers were inside its systems, the city was hit by crypto-locking malware, disrupting the city's email systems and leading to an ongoing network outage.

… Now the city council has approved plans to pay their attacker nearly $300,000 in cryptocurrency in return for the twin promises of receiving a decryption key and not seeing any city data get leaked, if indeed any got stolen, the Florence-based Times Daily reports.

… While the city took a number of measures after receiving the May 26 alert, Price tells Krebs that the IT department was still seeking emergency funding to do a more thorough investigation.

… Clearly, the city of Florence story looks like a missed opportunity by officials to react quickly enough.

"It would appear that they had a clear window of opportunity to respond in a robust and timely manner to the initial breach and prevent the ransom phase of the campaign," says incident response expert David Stubley, who heads Edinburgh, Scotland-based security testing firm and consultancy 7 Elements. "Unfortunately, it shows an example of why you need to respond robustly to a breach of a host and understand the capabilities of the actor and the malware."

While the city said that after the tip-off, it had found and isolated the one infected Windows system, that wasn't enough. Stubley said the investigation should have carried on much further.

"Once you understand the capabilities of the actor and the tooling in use, it is vital to assess other assets within the network as actors will look to move laterally and gain access to other systems," he says. "As such, removing just the first compromised device may not prevent sustained access to the network."

Why hackers hack.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgxpjy/hacker-bypasses-ges-ridiculous-refrigerator-drm

Hacker Bypasses GE's Ridiculous Refrigerator DRM

The technique allows you to use 'unauthorized' water filters, which cost a quarter as much as GE's official filters.

Earlier this year, we brought you the sordid tale of the GE refrigerator that won’t dispense filtered water unless consumers pay extra for “official” filters from the company. This sort of digital rights management and artificial, software-enforced monopoly is a scourge on consumer rights. Now, finally, a fed up customer has found a way to bypass GE’s refrigerator DRM, and has posted instructions online.

Depends on how work-at-home is managed.

https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/risk-of-data-loss-surges-in-the-era-of-coronavirus/

Risk of Data Loss Surges in the Era of Coronavirus

… This is according to a new data trends report by cybersecurity solutions firm Digital Guardian, which revealed that hundreds of terabytes of potentially sensitive corporate data might be at risk due to being stored in employee homes on USB drives.

… Among its findings, Digital Guardian showed that employees have been copying company data onto USB drives more than twice as often as they’d done prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in March, with a majority of that data being classified. Also noteworthy is that data egress though email, USB, and cloud services were similarly found to have surged during the pandemic, with much of that data also being classified. To top things off, sizeable increases in malicious activity on both corporate networks and servers, and in incident-response investigations, were uncovered by the report.

Tools.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/adobe-photoshop-camera/

Adobe Photoshop Camera Is Now Available for Free

Adobe has launched Photoshop Camera, a free camera app available on Android and iOS. Photoshop Camera brings some of the magic of Photoshop to your smartphone, allowing you to capture, edit, and share photos, as well as apply a range of fancy filters.

… Photoshop Camera comes with a handful of filters (which Adobe calls lenses), but you can find and download new ones in a matter of seconds. The filters range from subtle ones which change the lighting, to ones which replace the background with different effects.

You can see what effect a filter will have on a shot before you click the shutter button. And you can make changes after capturing an image, all while preserving the original shot. You can then share the images on social media, or export them to other Adobe products.

Download: Adobe Photoshop Camera on Android | iOS