May 14, 2021
It cost just under $5 million for Colonial Pipeline, the company that operates the largest fuel pipeline in the US, to pay off a gang of cybercriminals that hacked its servers, shut off the flow of oil and gas, and disrupted fuel supplies across the east coast. The company caved to hackers’ ransom demands within hours of the attack, Bloomberg News reported.
In a ransomware attack, criminals encrypt a company’s data and demand an extortion payment in exchange for a special key that will restore the company’s access to its files. Colonial Pipeline’s decision to pay the hackers flies in the face of most official recommendations. US policy and the standing advice of many other national governments and intelligence agencies is clear: Companies should not pay ransoms to hackers.
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Take aim at lifeblood of operators.
US government and industry officials confronting an epidemic of ransomware, where hackers freeze the computers of a target and demand a payoff, are zeroing in on cryptocurrency regulation as the key to combating the scourge, sources familiar with the work of a public-private task force said.
In a report on Thursday, the panel of experts is expected to call for far more aggressive tracking of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
While those have won greater acceptance among investors over the past year, they remain the lifeblood of ransomware operators and other criminals who face little risk of prosecution in much of the world.
Hacked drawings reveal new MacBook Pro
Leak believed to be the result of a cyber-attack on Apple partner Quanta Computer.
By
Macworld staff
| 7 hours ago
Following an action-packed spring event where Apple unveiled a new iMac, iPad Pro and Apple TV, plus its AirTag object tracker, all eyes are now on the next big launch: the MacBook Pro. And we ve received a big - if seemingly illicitly acquired - clue about that device s details.
The site 9to5Mac has published leaked drawings that show that this year s models of MacBook Pro will be equipped with a wider variety of ports including a dedicated MagSafe charging port, something that has been rumoured for a long time.