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A politically motivated hacker breached Columbia University's data systems last week, stealing troves of student documents while briefly shutting down the school's computer systems, a university official said. The June 24 cyberattack prompted widespread network outages on campus, locking students and staff out of their email accounts, coursework and video conference software for several hours. On the same day, images of President Donald Trump's smiling face appeared on several public monitors across the Manhattan campus. A spokesperson for Columbia declined to elaborate on the political motivations behind the attack. But they described a highly sophisticated hacktivist who had gained access to private student records in an attempt to further a political agenda. The spokesperson said it was unclear if the Trump photo display was connected to the data breach. We are investigating the scope of the apparent theft and will share our findings with the University community as well as anyo
Pharma to financial services conglomerate Piramal Group has denied any data breach in its system. A hacker on dark web last week claimed to be allegedly selling a database belonging to Piramal Group. When contacted, a Piramal spokesperson denied the claim. "We can confirm that there has been no data breach at Piramal Group. The suspicious activity on the dark web was evaluated and confirmed by our cybersecurity team as a false claim," the spokesperson said. The spokesperson said that as per the group's investigation, the sample data shared has no relevance to the group. "As per our investigation, the sample data shared is not Piramal Organization data and has no relevance to us. On further investigation, we have also found that the information in question seems to have originated from a third-party platform, Mailinator and not any of the systems at Piramal. Mailinator is not associated with Piramal Group in any form," the spokesperson said. Piramal Group has also shared the same
A small western Pennsylvania water authority was just one of multiple organisations breached in the US by Iran-affiliated hackers who targeted a specific industrial control device because it is Israeli-made, US and Israeli authorities say. The victims span multiple US states, the FBI, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, as well as Israel's National Cyber Directorate said in an advisory emailed to The Associated Press late Friday. They did not say how many organisations were hacked or otherwise describe them. Matthew Mottes, the chairman of the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, which discovered it had been hacked on November 25, said on Thursday that federal officials had told him the same group also breached four other utilities and an aquarium. Cybersecurity experts say that while there is no evidence of Iranian involvement in the October 7 attack into Israel by Hamas that triggered the war in Gaza they ..
A Brazilian hacker claimed at a Congressional hearing on Thursday that former President Jair Bolsonaro wanted him to hack into the country's electronic voting system to expose its alleged weaknesses ahead of the 2022 presidential election. Walter Delgatti Neto did not provide any evidence for his claim to the parliamentary commission of inquiry. But his detailed testimony raises new allegations against the former far-right leader, investigated for his role in the Jan. 8 riots in the capital city of Brasilia. Delgatti also told lawmakers that he met in person with Bolsonaro and told the former president it was not possible for him to hack the electronic voting system. The Associated Press has reached out to Bolsonaro's lawyers who have not yet responded. Bolsonaro has denied any wrongdoings. Bolsonaro's political nemesis, leftist Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, won the Oct. 30, 2022 election with just 50.9% of the votes. According to Delgatti, Bolsonaro had wanted the attempted hack to .
A China-based hacking group has breached email accounts linked to government agencies in Western Europe, Microsoft Corp. says. In a blog post published Tuesday, Microsoft said the group, which it identified as Storm-0558, focuses on acts such as espionage and data theft. The group gained access to email accounts affecting about 25 organisations including government agencies and to accounts of individuals linked to these organisations, and had gone undetected for about a month until customers complained to Microsoft about abnormal mail activity. We assess this adversary is focused on espionage, such as gaining access to email systems for intelligence collection, Charlie Bell, Microsoft's executive vice president of security, said in a separate Microsoft post. The hackers carried out the breach by forging authentication tokens a piece of information used to verify the identity of a user required to access the email accounts. Microsoft has since dealt with the attack and informed ..
Hackers said they had taken down the websites of Bahrain's international airport and state news agency on Tuesday to mark the 12-year anniversary of an Arab Spring uprising in the small Gulf country. A statement posted online by a group calling itself Al-Toufan, or The Flood in Arabic, claimed to have hacked the airport website, which was unavailable for at least a half hour in the middle of the day. It also claimed to have taken down the website of the state-run Bahrain News Agency, which was sporadically unavailable. The group posted images showing 504 Gateway Timeout Errors, saying the hacking was in support of the revolution of our oppressed people of Bahrain. The same group appears to have hacked and changed articles on the website of Akhbar Al Khaleej, a pro-government newspaper in Bahrain, hours earlier. The newspaper's website was still down Tuesday. There was no immediate comment from authorities. Feb. 14, 2011, marked the first day of protests led by Bahrain's Shiite ...
Flight operations of SpiceJet were hit after a ransomware attack recently. At least seven out of 10 Indian companies suffered from such attack last year. What can India Inc do to combat this threat?