Author Archives: Jeff Peters

This week’s top trending cybercrime story is a hack that wasn’t: Vermont’s Burlington Electric Department. A December 30 Washington Post story falsely claimed that Russian threat actors had penetrated the U.S. power grid via the Vermont utility. That story has since been widely debunked, as the alleged international hacking incident was set off by a… Read More Continue reading Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Russian Hacking and New Extortion Campaigns→

This week’s top trending cybercrime story is a hack that wasn’t: Vermont’s Burlington Electric Department. A December 30 Washington Post story falsely claimed that Russian threat actors had penetrated the U.S. power grid via the Vermont utility. That story has since been widely debunked, as the alleged international hacking incident was set off by a… Read More Continue reading Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Russian Hacking and New Extortion Campaigns→

Yahoo remained as the top trending cybercrime target due to a data breach affecting more than a billion accounts. The breach is so large that regulators such as the FTC and SEC are facing uncharted territory when it comes to potential fines or other consequences related to the incident, Vice News reported.   Looking beyond… Read More Continue reading Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Unique Cyber-Attacks and Insider Theft→

On Wednesday, Yahoo announced a data breach that affects more than one billion user accounts. The intrusion, which Yahoo believes occurred in August 2013, comes just months after the company announced a separate breach involving “at least 500 million user accounts.” The new breach was discovered after law enforcement received Yahoo data from a third… Read More Continue reading Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Largest Breach Ever and Law Firm Lawsuits→

Botnets were once again front-and-center this past week as new developments were announced by security researchers, malicious actors and government officials. To start, CloudFlare observed a ten-day long series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that have generated as much as 400 Gbps in traffic, sparking fears of yet another massive botnet that can disrupt organizations.… Read More Continue reading Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Another Botnet and the Gamification of Cybercrime→

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other incidents leading to service interruption have been widely discussed in the cybersecurity community ever since the October attack against DNS provider Dyn. This past week saw Marai-driven attacks that reportedly knocked out Internet access for the entire county of Liberia; however, security researchers such as Brian Krebs noted that… Read More Continue reading Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Services Get Disrupted and Hacking Elections→