This has been a tough month for people who are using older Windows Operating Systems, especially Windows 7 users.
The global Wannacry ransomware attack centered mostly on Windows 7 users, and now, a new attack has come to light that is making the lives of those users miserable all over again.
The recent “Wannacry” hacking attack was global in its scale, impacting companies in more than 150 nations before it was stopped by a security expert with a good eye. It was such a dangerous, widespread attack that Microsoft even took the highly unusual step of issuing an emergency patch for Windows XP users, even though they officially killed support for that platform some time ago.
Security researchers have stumbled across a vast treasure trove of hacked user accounts residing in a completely unprotected database online. The database contains more than 560 million user names, email addresses, passwords, IP addresses, physical addresses and more.
It seems that every time a company works hard to provide greater device security, it’s not long before an enterprising hacker comes along to find a way around the new and supposedly fool proof system.
The latest victim is Samsung’s new iris scanning technology, which has now been rolled out on their various smartphones.
As much attention as the recent, worldwide “Wannacry” ransomware attack got for bringing the UK’s health system to its knees and idling factories around the globe, it had another, less noticed, but no less important and terrifying impact.
An unnamed source recently released a screenshot of a “smart” medical device that had been locked and rendered inaccessible, thanks to the malware.
India’s largest online restaurant guide, Zomato, boasts some 120 million users. If you live there, or have employees in India, they may have been impacted, as the company has just reported that some 17 million of its user base saw their personal information compromised during a recent, large scale data breach.
As good as Google is about reviewing the apps that find their way into the halls of the Google Play Store, malicious code still manages to find its way inside. Granted, not nearly at the same rate you see in third party app stores, but it still happens.
If you’re a music fan, you’ve probably got several hundred (or more) MP3 files on your computer. It burst onto the scene while the internet was still in its formative stages and has been the defacto standard for audio codecs worldwide for more than two decades.
Sometimes, legitimate companies accidentally create malware. That’s certainly the case in this latest example.
It was an innocent mistake, but some debugging code was inadvertently left in the code of an audio driver used by more than two dozen models of HP laptops.
The Empire is officially striking back, and hacking is about to get at least a little bit harder.
Recently, there have been several high-profile attacks that relied on Google’s user data, the most recent of which was a large-scale phishing attack which attempted to gain access to Gmail accounts by tricking users into clicking on a poisoned Google Doc file.
