Attendees at Def Con, one of the world’s largest hacking conferences, are used to weird shenanigans, such as a seemingly innocuous wall of computer screens that display people’s passwords sniffed over the conference Wi-Fi network. But at this year’s event, even conference veterans were confused and concerned when their iPhones started showing pop-up messages prompting them to connect their Apple ID or share a password with a nearby Apple TV.
Imagine being able to sit behind a hacker and observe them take control of a computer and play around with it.
That’s pretty much what two security researchers did thanks to a large network of computers set up as a honeypot for hackers.
The researchers deployed several Windows servers deliberately exposed on the internet, set up with Remote Desktop Protocol, or RDP, meaning that hackers could remotely control the compromised servers as if they were regular users, being able to type and click around.
Hackers stole another half a million people’s personal and health information during a ransomware attack on a technology vendor earlier this year.
Intellihartx, a Tennessee-based company that handles patient payment balances and collections, said in a notice filed with the Maine attorney general’s office that 489,830 patients had information stolen in the cyberattack targeting its vendor, Fortra.
The number of victims affected by a mass-ransomware attack, caused by a bug in a popular data transfer tool used by businesses around the world, continues to grow as another organization tells TechCrunch that it was also hacked.
The City of Toronto told TechCrunch in a revised statement on March 23: “Today, the City of Toronto has confirmed that unauthorized access to City data did occur through a third party vendor. The access is limited to files that were unable to be processed through the third party secure file transfer system.”