Some 45 million Brits received fraudulent phone calls and texts over the summer, according to new data from Ofcom. The UK’s telecoms regulator polled 2,000 adults on September 18-19 2021, to assess how many had been affected in the previous three months. Some 82% said they had, with the vast majority (71%) claiming they’d received suspicious text messages. Three-quarters (75%) of those people were aged 16-34. Over two-fifths (44%) of those who’d received messages said they…

The US authorities appear to have scored another win in their fight against ransomware by forcing the infamous REvil group offline. Experts have warned that there could be repercussions for former breach victims. One former official and three private-sector cybersecurity experts confirmed to Reuters that an international operation was responsible for taking the group’s data leak site “Happy Blog” offline a few days ago. Government specialists managed to compromise some of the group’s backups so that when…

Two men from Eastern Europe have been imprisoned in the United States for helping cyber-criminals carry out cyber-attacks against individuals and financial institutions in America.  Pavel Stassi, a 30-year-old Estonian, and 33-year-old Aleksandr Skorodumov, of Lithuania, received custodial sentences for providing bulletproof hosting services that were used to distribute malware from 2009 to 2015. Court documents state that the two men were members of a bulletproof hosting organization founded and led by two Russian co-defendants, Aleksandr Grichishkin…

The United States’ Department of Justice (DOJ) is seeking to recover a financial penalty of nearly $10m that was imposed on a man from Montana for operating malicious robocalling campaigns.  The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) fined Libby resident Scott Rhodes $9,918,000 in January 2021 after discovering that he had illegally used caller ID spoofing with the intent to cause harm. An investigation by the FCC found that between May 2018 and December 2018 Rhodes had made thousands…

Ransomware attacks have been front and center in the news recently due to high-profile breaches that have impacted businesses across the globe. These headline grabbing attacks have been part of a larger global increase in ransomware crime. With a dramatic increase in security challenges due to the disruptions caused in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant increase in ransomware attacks.