Modern “smart” farm machinery is vulnerable to malicious hackers, leaving global supply chains exposed to risk, experts are warning.
It is feared hackers could exploit flaws in agricultural hardware used to plant and harvest crops.
Agricultural manufacturing giant John Deere says it is now working to fix any weak spots in its software.
New measures to ensure Canada doesn’t export sensitive technology to foreign adversaries are among the changes being eyed by Ottawa to bolster the country’s economic security.
Other possibilities include making it easier to fine companies that fail to comply with investment screening rules and mapping supply chains to identify critical vulnerabilities, according to a federal consultation paper.
Western governments jointly warned on Wednesday about a potential threat of increased malicious cyber activity by Russia against critical infrastructure as a response to sanctions imposed as punishment for its invasion of Ukraine.
The cybersecurity agencies of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand that together form the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance said the war could expose organizations everywhere to cyber crime.
A leak site says it has been given reams of data about the donors to the Canadian anti-vaccine mandate truckers after the fundraising platform popular with supporters of the movement allegedly suffered a hack.
Distributed Denial of Secrets announced on its website that it had 30 megabytes of donor information from Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo, including names, email addresses, zip codes, and internet protocol addresses.
At the same time, GiveSendGo appeared to be offline. Visitors to the website were met with the message that it was under maintenance and “we will be back very soon.” Messages seeking comment from the site’s operators were not immediately returned.
h/t RM
Canada’s cyberspy agency is warning of Moscow-backed cyberattacks on Canadian critical infrastructure as Western countries prepare economic sanctions in the growing expectation that Russia will invade Ukraine.
The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security joined its counterparts in the United States and United Kingdom on Thursday in urging Canadian companies, such as electrical utilities and energy firms, to watch out for cyberattacks from Russia.
I bet the Russians will be pissed to find the ChiComs got there first.
(Bloomberg) — In the days before Christmas, U.S. officials in Boston unveiled insider trading charges against a Russian tech tycoon they had been pursuing for months. They accused Vladislav Klyushin, who’d been extradited from Switzerland on Dec. 18, of illegally making tens of millions of dollars trading on hacked corporate-earnings information.
Yet as authorities laid out their securities fraud case, a striking portrait of the detainee emerged: Klyushin was not only an accused insider trader, but a Kremlin insider. He ran an information technology company that works with the Russian government’s top echelons. Just 18 months earlier, Klyushin received a medal of honor from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The U.S. had, in its custody, the highest-level Kremlin insider handed to U.S. law enforcement in recent memory.
The fact that log4j is such a ubiquitous piece of software is what makes this such a big deal. Imagine if a common type of lock used by millions of people to keep their doors shut was suddenly discovered to be ineffective. Switching a single lock for a new one is easy, but finding all the millions of buildings that have that defective lock would take time and an immense amount of work.
A critical vulnerability in a widely used software tool – one quickly exploited in the online game Minecraft – is rapidly emerging as a major threat to organizations around the world.
“The internet’s on fire right now,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice-president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. “People are scrambling to patch”, he said, “and all kinds of people scrambling to exploit it.” He said on Friday morning that in the 12 hours since the bug’s existence was disclosed, it had been “fully weaponized”, meaning malefactors had developed and distributed tools to exploit it.
Update: CRA takes down online services amid cybersecurity threat
Google has sued hackers believed to be part of a cybercrime gang that has stolen user information from around the world.
A complaint names two Russians and 15 unknown individuals said to be behind Glupteba, a malicious “botnet” that has infected over a million computers.
Criminals use these systems of compromised devices to hack private data.
It is the first case Google has launched against a botnet.
According to a lawsuit filed in New York and unsealed on Tuesday, the botnet built by Dmitry Starovikov, Alexander Filippov and their associates has become a “modern technological and borderless incarnation of organised crime”.
Kinda hard to pick out the bad guys here.
More than half of the known ransomware victims in Canada this year were critical infrastructure providers, according to a new threat assessment from Canada’s cyber spies, and the number is likely even higher.
As part of a push a new awareness campaign, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s foreign signals intelligence agency, released a ransomware bulletin Monday looking at the key trends of ransomware in 2021.
“Brazen, sophisticated, increasing in frequency, and, for the cybercriminals, very profitable,” assessed CSE’s Cyber Centre in its report.
One of the FBI’s most wanted men linked to ransomware gang REvil is living freely in a Siberian city with no sign the Russian authorities are acting to detain him.
DailyMail.com tracked suspected super-hacker Yevgeniy Polyanin, 28, to a chic $380,000 (USD) home in Barnaul where he was seen driving his $74,000 Toyota Land Cruiser 200, evidently feeling untouchable.
His wife Sofia, 28, openly runs an upscale social media baking business – including racy hen party cupcakes decorated with male genitalia – while he is accused by the US authorities of extorting millions of dollars from American businesses.
Many of the people on the FBI’s cyber most wanted list are Russian. While some allegedly work for the government earning a normal salary, others are accused of making a fortune from ransomware attacks and online theft. If they left Russia they’d be arrested – but at home they appear to be given free rein.
“We’re wasting our time,” I thought, as I watched a cat licking the carcass of a discarded takeaway chicken.
Surely there would no longer be any trace of an alleged multi-millionaire cyber-criminal on this dilapidated estate in a run-down town 700km (400 miles) east of Moscow.
The FBI has launched an investigation after thousands of fake email messages were sent from one of its servers warning of a possible cyber-attack.
The government agency said the incident on Saturday morning was part of an “ongoing situation”, but provided no further details.
The messages purported to be from the US Department of Homeland Security.
They claimed to be a warning about a supposed threat and were titled: “Urgent: Threat actor in systems.”
One cybersecurity expert says the cyberattack on the Newfoundland and Labrador health-care system may be the worst in Canadian history, and has implications for national security.
David Shipley, the CEO of a cybersecurity firm in Fredericton, said he’s seen similar breaches before, but usually on a smaller scale.
“We’ve never seen a health network takedown this large, ever,” Shipley said in an interview with CBC News. “The severity of this is what really sets it apart.”
Secretive gangs are hacking the computers of governments, firms, even hospitals, and demanding huge sums. But if we pay these ransoms, are we creating a ticking time bomb?
They have the sort of names that only teenage boys or aspiring Bond villains would dream up (REvil, Grief, Wizard Spider, Ragnar), they base themselves in countries that do not cooperate with international law enforcement and they don’t care whether they attack a hospital or a multinational corporation. Ransomware gangs are suddenly everywhere, seemingly unstoppable – and very successful.
