Welcome to this week in NerdNews (TWINN). Your weekly top 5 technical and security issues Nerds should pay attention to:
Company That Routes Billions of Text Messages Quietly Says It Was Hacked. For five years! While we’ve known for a while that there’s no encryption or security around the SMS service, this might just be another reason to stop using SMS altogether. Stay tuned for a future youtube video on just this topic.
Google is about to turn on two-factor authentication by default for millions of users. It’s surprising that it has taken this long, and this will be good for us all. What we should remember is that in a Business Email Compromise (BEC) scenario, it is the *other* party that represents the risk to you. You could have all the security in the world, but if the party you communicate with is insecure, that is your vulnerability. Requiring MFA on Google accounts will represent a reduction of risk to all.
US gov’t will slap contractors with civil lawsuits for hiding breaches. “For too long, companies have chosen silence under the mistaken belief that it is less risky to hide a breach than to bring it forward and to report it,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco, who is pioneering the initiative. “Well, that changes today.
North American Orgs Hit With an Average of 497 Cyberattacks per Week. Even Ransomware attacks overall so far in 2021 have increased by 93% compared with the same period last year. Our collective callousness over ransomware stories hasn’t slowed them down. We need to be more vigilant than ever.
A company spotted a security breach. Then investigators found this new mysterious malware. What’s interesting here is that Dropbox is being developed with this stealthy malware author to be its Command and Control channel. This is like hiding in plain sight. Each time we see a new story like this, we once again see the importance of Zero Trust going forward.
Did you know?
Following last Monday’s arguably good productivity news of Facebook’s outage, there are serious discussions about whether we would indeed be better off if Facebook ceased to exist. Plus Facebook harms children and weakens democracy: ex-employee.
For a video version of this see: https://youtu.be/bzo0yS9KX2I
