Collaborate Disseminate
By Deeba Ahmed
Ghana’s National Service Secretariate – NSS – exposed 55GB worth of citizens’ data when an AWS S3 bucket used by the Secretariate suffered misconfiguration.
This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Ghana govt agency expos… Continue reading Ghana govt agency exposed 700k citizens’ data in a database mess up
For patients and healthcare professionals to properly track and manage illnesses especially chronic ones, healthcare needs to be decentralized. It also needs to be more convenient, with a patient’s health information able to follow them wherever they go. Redbird, a Ghanaian healthtech startup that allows easy access to convenient testing and ensures that doctors and […] Continue reading Ghana’s Redbird raises $1.5M seed to expand access to rapid medical testing in sub-Saharan Africa
Two accused scammers have arrived in the U.S. from Ghana to face charges that they were involved in separate conspiracies to defraud American victims out of millions of dollars. Deborah Mensah, a 33-year-old Ghanian national, stands accused of stealing more than $10 million through business email compromise (BEC) fraud, in which she allegedly targeted businesses and elderly individuals as part of an international scam. Mensah is the eight person to be charged as part of the investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice said Wednesday. The department also announced that another accused BEC scammer, Maxwell Peter, had been extradited to the U.S. to face charges in an unrelated case. “Deborah Mensah is alleged to have been a participant in a conspiracy that resulted in the theft of millions of dollars from businesses and vulnerable individuals across the United States, and the laundering of that money through a network of bank accounts in […]
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Three former government officials in Ghana have been sentenced to jail for purchasing spyware products from Israeli software surveillance company NSO Group. The country’s former national security coordinator, Salifu Osman, and director-general of the country’s telecommunications authority, William Tetteh Tevie, were sentenced to five years in prison, according to Ghana Business News and other local news outlets. A former board chairman of the telecommunications authority, Eugene Baffoe-Bonnie, was sentenced to six years because he allegedly made $200,000 from the deal, according to Graphic Online. The case, which has been in the country’s high court since 2017, hinged on the argument that officials had caused significant financial loss in the country due to their $4 million purchase of NSO Group’s signature Pegasus spyware. The National Communications Authority (NCA) allegedly bought the surveillance product through a reseller in order to track suspected terrorism, according to Graphic Online, which attended the court session Tuesday. It […]
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The Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm responsible for interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, has outsourced its activities in 2020 to Ghana and Nigeria, Facebook said in an announcement Thursday. It wasn’t clear that the new behavior, which led Facebook to remove 49 Facebook accounts, 69 Pages and 85 Instagram accounts for participating in foreign interference online, was focused on elections or political candidates, according to the company. They tended instead to focus on U.S. news, black history, black fashion, black excellence, celebrity gossip, historical figures, and LGBTQ issues. But the links to the IRA were clear, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said in a blog post. “Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their purpose and coordination, our investigation found links to EBLA, an NGO in Ghana, and individuals associated with past activity by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA).” The IRA, which […]
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Cybercriminals are using a combination of hacking techniques to target financial institutions throughout West Africa, according to research published Thursday by Symantec. Firms in Cameroon, Congo, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea and Ivory Coast have been hit with cyberattacks that combine known forms of malicious software with “living off the land” techniques to infiltrate organizations. “Living off the land” is industry jargon that refers to hackers’ exploitation of otherwise benign tools already installed on a computer. In this case, attackers used PowerShell scripts, remote desktop protocols and Microsoft administration tools in gaining access to their targets, researchers found. Symantec identified four types of such cyberattacks but did not attribute them to any specific hacking group. Instead it described the research as an example the globalization of cybercrime. “Until now, Symantec has seen relatively little evidence of these kinds of attacks against the financial sector,” the company said in a blog post. “However, it now appears […]
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