Category Archives: Red Cross

Red Cross attributes hack to nation-state actor

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The International Committee of the Red Cross has concluded that a nation-state hacker was behind a cyberattack on its servers discovered last month. A forensic analysis of the attack revealed the use of tools designed specifically to go after ICRC servers, the organization said Wednesday. “This was a sophisticated attack — a criminal act — breaching sensitive humanitarian data,” ICRC Director-General Robert Mardini said. “We know that the attack was targeted because the attackers created code designed solely for execution on the concerned ICRC servers, a technique we believe was designed to shield the hackers’ activities from detection and subsequent forensic investigations.” Separate from Mardini’s statement, the organization released a summary of the technical findings by an unnamed “specialist cyber security company.” The forensic report does not attribute the attack to any specific advanced persistent threat (APT) group, and ICRC declined to speculate on the culprit. “[M]ost of the malicious […]

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State Department sounds alarm over Red Cross breach

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The U.S. State Department said the hack of the International Committee of the Red Cross last month was a “dangerous development” that has harmed the organization’s family re-unification mission. The commentary from Foggy Bottom comes in response to a Jan. 19 announcement from the Red Cross that a cyberattack compromised personal data for more than half a million people from at least 60 Red Cross and associated Red Crescent national organizations across the globe. “Targeting the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement’s sensitive and confidential data is a dangerous development,” said Ned Price, a spokesman for the State Department. “It has real consequences: this cyber incident has harmed the global humanitarian network’s ability to locate missing people and reconnect families. This is why it is so vital that humanitarian data be respected and only used for intended purposes.” Price also called on other nations to join the State Department and […]

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Large scale cyberattack halts Red Cross work reuniting families, exposes confidential data

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A cyberattack compromised personal and confidential data on more than half a million people helped by at least 60 Red Cross and Red Crescent organizations around the world, the International Committee of the Red Cross announced Wednesday. The organization said the exposed information belonged to highly vulnerable groups, including families separated by conflict. “An attack on the data of people who are missing makes the anguish and suffering for families even more difficult to endure. We are all appalled and perplexed that this humanitarian information would be targeted and compromised,” said Robert Mardini, ICRC’s director general. “This cyber-attack puts vulnerable people, those already in need of humanitarian services, at further risk.” International human rights organizations and nonprofits are popular targets for attackers. The United Nations confirmed in September it was hit earlier in the year by attackers that breached its infrastructure and accessed. The Red Cross has been a strong […]

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The Hackers and the Hurricane

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When natural disasters strike, particularly if they are in some of the less remote parts of the world, we see them unfolding in real-time on our television screens. They become a 24-hour rolling news exercise in disaster titillation, each fresh horror ghoulishly picked over by breathless reporters live-telecasting from windswept streets, and endlessly rehashed by a succession of in-studio expert guests.

Then once the required image of a dusty child being pulled from the rubble or a tearful mother describing her daughter being swept away is in the can, a politician somewhere is found in bed with a model or …read more

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