Two teenage girls who went missing from the same North Carolina county used school-issued laptops to communicate with their alleged abductors.  Savannah Grace Childress vanished on February 11 from her home on Canaan Church Road in Denton. The 14-year-old was found alive ten days later in Arkansas.  Law enforcement officers investigating Childress’ disappearance discovered that the teen had been using a computer given to her by Davidson County Schools to chat with multiple people on various online platforms. …

The Javascript-based infection framework for the Gootkit RAT was enhanced to deliver a wider variety of malware, including ransomware. Experts from Sophos documented the evolution of the “Gootloader,” the framework used for delivering the Gootkit RAT banking Trojan. The framework was improved to deploy a wider range of malware, including ransomware payloads. “In recent years, almost as much effort has gone into improvement of its delivery method as has gone into the NodeJS-based malware itself.” reads…

A dispute over wages could see workers at Canada’s equivalent of the United States’ National Security Agency stage a strike.  The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), which represents 2,400 employees working in cryptography, applied mathematics, advanced language analysis, and cybersecurity at the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), voted last week to authorize a strike following a disagreement about changes to a wage supplement.  The supplement—known as the market allowance—was put in place to make employees’…

American cybersecurity firm Rapid7 has opened a new office in the heart of Northern Ireland’s capital city. The company, which is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, serves over 9,100 customers through 14 different offices around the world.   Rapid7’s newest digs, located in Belfast’s Chichester House, can accommodate up to 400 employees. The company said the major expansion will create up to 150 new jobs and internships in customer support, engineering, and development. New employees will have access to…

Microsoft has highlighted the increasingly sophisticated cyber-threat landscape, particularly as a result of the rise in nation state attacks. During a session at the Microsoft Ignite event, the company outlined some of the trends it is seeing and actions it is taking to help mitigate them. There has been marked rise in cyber-attacks detected by Microsoft over recent years, both from cyber-criminals and nation state actors, with the latter becoming a particular cause for concern. Tom…