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Los Angeles Suburb Hit with Ransomware

Last month, the City of Torrance, California fell victim to a ransomware attack that shut down many of their internal systems and demanded 100 Bitcoins to not publish the stolen data. Along with the roughly 200GB of data it stole from the city, the DoppelPaymer ransomware also deleted all local backups and encrypted hundreds of workstations. At this time, it’s uncertain whether the City of Torrance has chosen to pay the ransom, as the malware authors seem to have diligently removed any means for the City to recuperate on their own.

Malicious Packages Hidden Within Popular File Repository

Over 700 malicious packages have been discovered within the RubyGems main program and file repository. These originated from just two accounts and were uploaded over a single week period in late February. Between them, the many packages have a combined download number of over 100,000, most of which included a cryptocurrency script that could identify and intercept cryptocurrency transactions being made on Windows® devices. While this isn’t the first time malicious actors have used open source file repositories to distribute malicious payloads, this infiltration of an official hub for such a long period of time speaks to the lack of security within these types of systems.

Maze Ransomware Targets Cognizant ISP

Late last week, the Maze Ransomware group took aim at New Jersey-based internet service provider, Cognizant, and took down a significant portion of their internal systems. The attack occurred just a day after the removal of a dark web post that offered access to an IT company’s systems for $200,000. It had been listed for nearly a week. While Cognizant has already begun contacting its customers about the attack, the true extent of the damage remains unclear.

COVID-19 Scams Net $13 Million

The Federal Trade Commission recently released statistics on the number of complaints they’ve received specifically related to the COVID-19 pandemic: it’s over 17,000 in just a three-month period. While this number is assuredly less than the actual number of COVID-19 related scams, these reported complaints have resulted in a sum of over $13 million in actual losses, ranging from fraudulent payments to travel cancellations and refunds. Additionally, the FTC was able to catalogue over 1,200 COVID-19 related scam calls reported by people on the Do Not Call list.

Customer Data Stolen from Fitness App

A database belonging containing 40GB of personally identifiable information on thousands of customers of the fitness app, Kinomap, was found unsecured. Containing a total of 42 million records, the database remained accessible for nearly 2 weeks after the company was informed. It was only secured at last after French data protection officials were notified. Kinomap API keys were also among the exposed data, which would have allowed malicious visitors to hijack user accounts and steal any available data.