A subsequent breakdown per state shows California leading the table with the highest number of Hacking and IT cases with 49; Texas follows in second with 4; while New York has 39 breaches, Florida and Pennsylvania have 38 breaches each.

The cyber-attack was noticed by private cybersecurity company FireEye in December. The attack was found to be a wide-ranging intrusion into multiple systems of federal government agencies by a group known as UNC2452, who are suspected to be Russian.

According to German authorities, the joint operation was months in the works and was part of a larger investigation that saw the takedown of website hosting provider CyberBunker in southwestern Germany in September 2019.

The data stolen from EMA first appeared on various hacking forums on December 31st, 2020, with the data being originally stolen on December 9th, 2020. Amongst the data released include email screenshots, peer review information, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, and Word documents.

“The cyber threat actors involved in these attacks used a variety of tactics and techniques—including phishing, brute force login attempts, and possibly a ‘pass-the-cookie’ attack—to attempt to exploit weaknesses in the victim organizations’ cloud security practices.”

With the establishment of Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Transport Layer Security (HTTPS), DNS requests are now encrypted to provide privacy, integrity, and “last mile” source authentication for DNS transactions with a client’s DNS resolver.

Ransomware attacks have been on the rise in the past year with about 65% of global organizations reporting suffering a ransomware attack in the past 12 months.

It is essential that law enforcement is as prepared as possible for what will be an onslaught of all types of criminal activity linked to the COVID-19 vaccine, which is why INTERPOL has issued this global warning.

Egregor is relatively new in its operations but is a highly organized cybercrime organization that conducts ransomware-as-a-service operation that does partnerships with operations to deploy ransomware and compromise networks. The affiliates earn 70% of any ransom payments they bring in, while the Egregor operators take a 30% revenue share.

A money mule, or a “smurfer” is any individual who transfers illegally acquired funds via his/her personal account or a mule account created, electronically or through courier service on behalf of others.