Cybersecurity Expert

A roundup of UK focused Cyber and Information Security News, Blog Posts, Reports and general Threat Intelligence from the previous calendar month, February 2020. Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council became the latest UK organisation to become the victim of a mass ransomware attack  which started on 8th February.  The north-east Council's servers, PCs, mobile devices, websites and even phone lines have been down for three weeks at the time of writing. A Redcar and Cleveland councillor told the Guardian it would take several months to recover and the cost is expected to between £11m and £18m to repair the damage done . A significant sum for the cash-strapped council, which confirmed their outage as ransomware caused 19 days after the attack. The strain of ransomware involved and the method initial infiltration into the council's IT systems has yet to be confirmed. The  English FA shut down its investigation into allegations Liverpool employees hacked into Manchester ...

In recent years political motivated cyber-attacks during elections has become an expected norm, so it was no real surprise when the  Labour Party reported it was hit with two DDoS cyber-attacks in the run up to the UK general election, which was well publicised by the media. However, what wasn't well publicised was both the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats Party were also hit with cyber attacks. These weren't nation-state orchestrated cyberattacks either, black hat hacking group Lizard Squad, well known for their high profile DDoS attacks, are believed to be the culprits. The launch of Disney Plus didn’t go exactly to plan, without hours of the streaming service going live, compromised Disney Plus user accounts credentials were being sold on the black market for as little as £2.30 a pop . Disney suggested hackers had obtained customer credentials from previously leaked identical credentials, as used by their customers on other compromised or insecure websites, and ...