Enlarge (credit: Don Farrall/Getty Images)

In February, attackers from the Russia-based BlackCat ransomware group hit a physician practice in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, that's part of the Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN). At the time, LVHN said that the attack “involved” a patient photo system related to radiation oncology treatment. The health care group said that BlackCat had issued a ransom demand, “but LVHN refused to pay this criminal enterprise.”

After a couple of weeks, BlackCat threatened to publish data stolen from the system. “Our blog is followed by a lot of world media, the case will be widely publicized and will cause significant damage to your business,” BlackCat wrote on their dark-web extortion site. “Your time is running out. We are ready to unleash our full power on you!” The attackers then released three screenshots of cancer patients receiving radiation treatment and seven documents that included patient information.

Enlarge / A GitHub-made image accompanying all the company's communications about 2FA. (credit: GitHub )

Software development tool GitHub will require more accounts to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) starting on March 13 . That mandate will extend to all user accounts by the end of 2023.

GitHub announced its plan to roll out a 2FA requirement in a blog post last May. At that time, the company's chief security officer said that it was making the move because GitHub (which is used by millions of software developers around the world across myriad industries) is a vital part of the software supply chain. Said supply chain has been subject to several attacks in recent years and months, and 2FA is a strong defense against social engineering and other particularly common methods of attack.

When that blog post was written, GitHub revealed that only around 16.5 percent of active GitHub users used 2FA—far lower than you'd expect from technologists who ought to know the value of it.

Enlarge / Supply-chain attacks, like the latest PyPi discovery, insert malicious code into seemingly functional software packages used by developers. They're becoming increasingly common. (credit: Getty Images)

Researchers have discovered yet another set of malicious packages in PyPi , the official and most popular repository for Python programs and code libraries. Those duped by the seemingly familiar packages could be subject to malware downloads or theft of user credentials and passwords.

Check Point Research, which reported its findings Monday , wrote that it didn't know how many people had downloaded the 10 packages, but it noted that PyPi has 613,000 active users, and its code is used in more than 390,000 projects. Installing from PyPi through the pip command is a foundational step for starting or setting up many Python projects. PePy , a site that estimates Python project downloads, suggests most of the malicious packages saw hundreds of downloads.

Such supply-chain attacks are becoming increasingly common, especially among open source software repositories that support a wide swath of the world's software. Python's repository is a frequent target, with researchers finding malicious packages in September 2017 ; June , July , and November 2021; and June of this year. But trick packages have also been found in RubyGems in 2020 , NPM in December 2021 , and many more open source repositories.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Rayford | Getty Images)

Nearly a week after a ransomware attack led Colonial Pipeline to halt fuel distribution on the East Coast , reports emerged on Friday that the company paid a 75 bitcoin ransom—worth as much as $5 million, depending on the time of payment—in an attempt to restore service more quickly. And while the company was able to restart operations Wednesday night , the decision to give in to hackers' demands will only embolden other groups going forward. Real progress against the ransomware epidemic, experts say, will require more companies to say no.

Not to say that doing so is easy. The FBI and other law enforcement groups have long discouraged ransomware victims from paying digital extortion fees, but in practice many organizations resort to paying. They either don't have the backups and other infrastructure necessary to recover otherwise, can't or don't want to take the time to recover on their own, or decide that it's cheaper to just quietly pay the ransom and move on. Ransomware groups increasingly vet their victims' financials before springing their traps , allowing them to set the highest possible price that their victims can still potentially afford.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Dan and Tim will present a beautiful web application based on Strophe.js and Flot.js to visualise live measuremen data transmitted via XMPP PubSub/PEP. This is not about instant messaging at all, this is IoT, but security included.

When? Wednesday, 2021-05-12 18:00 CEST (always 2ⁿᵈ Wednesday of every month)

Where? Online, via our MUC (xmpp:berlin-meetup@conference.conversations.im?join). A Jitsi video conference will be announced there.

See you then!

#jabber #berlin #meetup #community #xmpp #iot #webapplication #javascript #strophejs #flotjs #pubsub #pep #security #renewableenergy

If the French service Qwant.com is set as the #search provider in your web #browser (Firefox, Iridium...), it may occur that it shows a message telling it's not "available" in your region. This can happen if you're using TOR, a VPN, or for other reasons.

To circumvent this, you may :

1. Go to the search bar (CTRL + L), edit qwant.com as ddg.gg and hit Enter, you'll go to #DuckDuckGo with the same request.
2. Or for the next searches, write as following into the search bar: !ddg my keywords to perform the same search throught Duck Duck Go, instead of your original #request my keywords

If it happens too often, change the default search engine.

(credit: Chrome )

Users of Google’s Chrome browser have faced three security concerns over the past 24 hours in the form of a malicious extension with more than 2 million users, a just-fixed zero-day, and new information about how malware can abuse Chrome's sync feature to bypass firewalls. Let’s discuss them one by one.

First up, the Great Suspender, an extension with more than 2 million downloads from the Chrome Web Store, has been pulled from Google servers and deleted from users’ computers. The extension has been an almost essential tool for users with small amounts of RAM on their devices. Since Chrome tabs are known to consume large amounts of memory, the Great Suspender temporarily suspends tabs that haven’t been opened recently. That allows Chrome to run smoothly on systems with modest resources.

Characteristically terse

Google's official reason for the removal is characteristically terse. Messages displayed on devices that had the extension installed say only, “This extension contains malware” along with an indication that it has been removed. A Google spokesman declined to elaborate.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Here's something we missed with the latest NVIDIA driver updates - turns out that NVIDIA had multiple security issues that they put out in a recent security bulletin. Multiple issues affect both Windows and Linux, across multiple versions of the official NVIDIA proprietary driver.

The ones that affect the Linux desktop are:

• CVE‑2021‑1052: "NVIDIA GPU Display Driver for Windows and Linux contains a vulnerability in the kernel mode layer (nvlddmkm.sys) handler for DxgkDdiEscape or IOCTL in which user-mode clients can access legacy privileged APIs, which may lead to denial of service, escalation of privileges, and information disclosure."
• CVE‑2021‑1053: "NVIDIA GPU Display Driver for Windows and Linux contains a vulnerability in the kernel mode layer (nvlddmkm.sys) handler for DxgkDdiEscape or IOCTL in which improper validation of a user pointer may lead to denial of service."
• CVE‑2021‑1056: "NVIDIA GPU Display Driver for Linux contains a vulnerability in the kernel mode layer (nvidia.ko) in which it does not completely honor operating system file system permissions to provide GPU device-level isolation, which may lead to denial of service or information disclosure."

There's also some vGPU security issues too, which also affect Linux but they're not regular desktop stuff.

If you want to make sure you're totally safe you should update to the latest driver in the series you're using. Going by the information on the NVIDIA security page you should be good on (or better) 460.32.03 which is the latest "Production Branch" driver, 450.102.04 and 390.141 being the latest Legacy driver.

You can look out for future security info here from NVIDIA.