A man from Fermanagh has been arrested along with a Dutch national (both aged 22) for their part in running the illicit credential marketplace WeLeakInfo. A joint collaboration between law enforcement in the UK, Northern Ireland, Germany, the US and the Netherlands was kicked off in the summer of 2019, with the site alleged to have over 12 billion credentials for sale, from various nefarious sources.
It’s a scary time to be an internet user, with three huges troves of user data recently discovered to be exposed online; opening users up to phishing emails, spam and even credential stuffing attacks.
Gardaí have reported a sharp increase in the number of invoice redirect and CEO fraud-style attacks on Irish businesses in the last few months. “We are getting a couple of cases every week now”, according to Detective Superintendent Pat Lordan, who said that both small and large companies are being hit for amounts ranging from €10,000 into the millions.
In a move that is likely to shock corporations in Europe and beyond, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined British Airways (BA) just over £183 million, due to a 2018 data breach in which personal data belonging to 500,000 of its’ customers was compromised. The move marks the first large fine handed down to a company since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect in May of last year and, shockingly, was less than 50% of the maximum fine that the ICO could have set for BA.
In the latest major security breach to rock the business world, three major US-based antivirus companies have been hit by Russian hacker group Fxmsp. Fxmsp, who are well known in the cyber security community for previous high-profile breaches, began advertising the spoils of their latest venture on the dark web for upwards of $300,000, while providing strong evidence of their claims.
