External News

You are welcome to browse some useful websites, such as "The Daily Swig: Cybersecurity News and Views" for more cyber-related news and trends. Below please find some most important ones that happened in the recent past.

2022

• Nov 30 2022, ChatGPT Release: the latest version of a natural-language system by software company OpenAI of San Francisco, California was released.
• July 2022, Twitter Data Leak: Cyber Security Hub reported that a hacker going by the alias "devil" claimed to have the details for 5.4 million Twitter accounts for sale. The hacker said they had harvested the information using a vulnerability previously flagged to Twitter on January 1, 2022. Twitter confirmed the breach on August 5, and suggested that in the future users should enable two-factor authentication to protect their accounts from unauthorized logins (Source: The top 10 hacks and cyber security threats of 2022).

2021

• May 7 2021, Colonial Pipeline Company Ransomware Attack: the Colonial Pipeline Company reported that it had fallen prey to a cybersecurity attack involving ransomware and had been forced to take its pipeline – which supplies about half of the East Coast’s gasoline – offline. The potential impact of a prolonged disruption was deemed serious enough to justify paying the hackers, an eastern European outfit called DarkSide, $4.4 million worth of bitcoin (Source: The Biggest Cyberattacks in History).
• June 2021, RockYou2021 Hack: the largest stolen password collection of all time saw 8.4 billion passwords leaked. The RockYou2021.txt is a collection of breached passwords and credentials, potential passwords, and wordlists. The list was posted on a famous hacker forum in early June 2021 and immediately caused a security scare online (Source: Exposed: RockYou2021, the largest password breach in history, wasn’t actually a breach).

2020

• March 26 2020, SolarWinds Hack: more than 18,000 SolarWinds customers installed the malicious updates, with the malware spreading undetected. Through this code, hackers accessed SolarWinds's customer information technology systems, which they could then use to install even more malware to spy on other companies and organizations (Source: SolarWinds hack explained: Everything you need to know).

2019

• March 5 2019, Ghidra Release: the free and open source reverse engineering tool developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States was released.

2018

• October 8 2018, Meltdown and Spectre Mitigations: Intel was reported to have added hardware and firmware mitigations regarding Spectre and Meltdown (recently-discovered vulnerabilities found in Intel, AMD, Apple, and ARM processor chips) to its latest processors (Source: Wikipedia).

2017

• June 2017, the NotPetya Virus: the virus encrypted victims’ hard drives and prevented them from accessing their files. However, unlike typical ransomware, the NotPetya virus did not provide a way for victims to recover their data. This made it much more destructive (Source: The Top 5 Most Dangerous Cyber Attacks of all Time).
• May 2017, WannaCry Ransomware Attack: a worldwide cyberattack, by the WannaCry ransomware cryptoworm, targeted computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system by encrypting data and demanding ransom payments in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. (Source: Wikipedia).

2016

• Aug 2016, Mirai Botnet Attack: a type of malware that targets consumer devices like smart cameras and home routers, turning them into a zombie network of remote controlled bots. Mirai botnets are used by cybercriminals to target computer systems in massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. (Source: What Is the Mirai Botnet?).

2015

• Dec 23 2021, Ukraine Power Grid Attack: the power grid in two western oblasts of Ukraine was hacked, which resulted in power outages for roughly 230,000 consumers in Ukraine for 1-6 hours (Source: Wikipedia).
• July 2015, Remote Vehicle Attack: hackers managed to remotely control a Jeep Cherokee, blasting the radio and even killing the engine. (Source: Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway - With Me in It).