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Thousands of Organisations Compromised by ‘Hafnium’ Email Hack

As the saying goes, there’s no rest for the wicked. Just a few months after behemoth IT management solutions provider SolarWinds was the victim of a major cyber attack, IT professionals across the globe are scrambling to patch their Exchange servers against a new zero-day exploit.

Earlier this month, it was announced that hundreds of thousands of organisations (at least 30,000 in the US alone) had potentially been compromised by a group called Hafnium, who are based out of China and believed to be state-sponsored.

The Hafnium Exchange hack dwarfed the SolarWings hack, which was itself one of the largest organised hacks in recent years.
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Many SolarWinds Customers Still Exposed Online, Despite Well-Publicised Breach

IT management software giant Solarwinds were the victims of what is believed to be one of the largest cyber attacks yet late last year, sending shivers down the spine of much of the tech world. The attack breached SolarWinds monitoring tool Orion, which allowed the hackers to deliver malicious updates to unsuspecting users of the tool for several months.

Now, two months after the breach was discovered, an alarming number of SolarWinds customers still have vulnerable Orion servers exposed to the internet.

SolarWinds, a behemoth IT management solutions provider with over 300,000 customers, was revealed to be the target of a major cyber attack in December 2020.
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Cyber Attacks Rarely Change Tactics, According to NSA

According to Dave Hogue, the technical director of the NSA’s Cybersecurity Threat Operations Center, the technology used to implement cyber attacks evolves over time but the tactics used to carry them out rarely changes. Hogue told the crowd at the CyberUK conference in Manchester, “Every day we’re battling a new cyber-threat, but the more that things change the more that they stay the same.”


Dave Hogue is the technical director of the NSA CTOC, and claims that they have not responded to any ‘zero-day’ cyber attacks in two years.

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HSE, Dublin County Council, Department of Argiculture and More Hit by Crypto-Mining Cyber Attack

Ireland is claimed to be wide open to attacks from cyber criminals and rogue states, following an incident in which over 4000 websites around the world were hacked and used to mine crypto-currency. First reported by The Register, the breach affected the Department of Argicultures, Dublin City Council and Fingal, Cork, Wexford and Offaly county councils, and it is suspected to have also affected the websites of the Oireachtas, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, Women’s Aid and the Central Remedial Clinic. The crypto-mining attack was not limited to Irish websites, however, as the Information Commisioner’s Office in the UK, the United States courts and many more sites belonging to governments and organisations were also hit.


Over 4000 websites around the world were affected in the crypto-mining attack, many of which belonged to government organisations

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Reports Show Cyber Crime Cost Consumers €150bn in 2017

Norton has just released their annual Cyber Security Insights Report, which analyses the effects of cyber crime around the world. One of the key findings of this report is that when it comes to cyber security, “consumers are overconfident in their security prowess, leaving them vulnerable and enabling cyber criminals to up the ante this year, which has resulted in record attacks”. Over the course of 2017, the report estimates that over 978 million adults in 20 countries around the world experienced cyber crime. These attacks cost consumers an estimated €150 billion.

While most people stated that cyber security was important to them, one third of people stored their passwords insecurely and one fifth admitted to using the same password across all sites they use. Over half of the respondents reported either they or someone they knew had been a victim of cyber crime, with the average cyber crime victim spending almost three full working days recovering from the attack.


“When it comes to cyber security, consumers are overconfident in their security prowess, leaving them vulnerable and enabling cyber criminals to up the ante this year, which has resulted in record attacks.”

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