UK unprepared for catastrophic ransomware attack: Report – Anadolu Agency | English
UK unprepared for catastrophic ransomware attack: Report Anadolu Agency | English
Tag Archive for: ‘Catastrophic’
UK At High Risk Of ‘Catastrophic Ransomware Attack,’ Parliamentary Committee Warns
The U.K.’s apparent lack of preparedness and insufficient investment in cybersecurity has reportedly left it highly prone to “catastrophic ransomware attacks,” as per a parliamentary committee.
What Happened: The joint committee on the national security strategy has raised concerns about the U.K.’s susceptibility to a cyber-attack capable of disrupting critical national infrastructure or CNI such as energy, water supply, transport, healthcare, and telecommunications services, reported The Guardian.
The committee criticized the U.K. government and the Home Office for their failure to address ransomware threats adequately and underscored their lack of sufficient investment to deter large-scale cyberattacks.
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Recent ransomware attacks on U.K. public services, including the NHS and, Redcar and Cleveland council, were pointed out as indicators of the looming threat. The committee also expressed concerns about the vulnerability of the U.K.’s CNI due to its dependence on outsourced IT systems.
The report warned of potential threats to human lives from future ransomware attacks if cyber criminals manage to interfere with CNI operations. The NHS was identified as a particular area of concern given its outdated IT services and lack of investment.
Additionally, the committee pointed out ransomware groups in Russia, North Korea, and Iran as primary threats targeting the U.K., based on information from the National Cyber Security Centre or NCSC.
Harjinder Singh Lallie, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Warwick, suggested regularly updating operating systems and computer hardware could mitigate overall costs and disruption.
In response to the report, a government spokesperson said, “The UK is well prepared to respond to cyber threats and has taken robust action to improve our cyber defenses, investing £2.6bn under our cyber security strategy and rolling out the first ever government-backed minimum standards for cybersecurity through the NCSC’s cyber essentials scheme.”
Why It Matters: This warning comes on the heels of increased ransomware attacks globally. Just last…
EV Charger Hacking Poses a ‘Catastrophic’ Risk
Such cracks could conceivably permit hackers to access vehicle data or consumers’ credit card information, says Ken Munro, a cofounder of Pen Test Partners. But perhaps the most worrying weakness to him was that, as with the Concordia testing, his team discovered that many of the devices allowed hackers to stop or start charging at will. That could leave frustrated drivers without a full battery when they need one, but it’s the cumulative impacts that could be truly devastating.
“It’s not about your charger, it’s about everyone’s charger at the same time,” he says. Many home users leave their cars connected to chargers even if they aren’t drawing power. They might, for example, plug in after work and schedule the vehicle to charge overnight when prices are lower. If a hacker were to switch thousands, or millions, of chargers on or off simultaneously, it could destabilize and even bring down entire electricity networks.
“We’ve inadvertently created a weapon that nation-states can use against our power grid,” says Munro. The United States glimpsed what such an attack might look like in 2021 when hackers hijacked Colonial Pipeline and disrupted gasoline supplies nationwide. The attack ended once the company paid millions of dollars in ransom.
Munro’s top recommendation for consumers is to not connect their home chargers to the internet, which should prevent the exploitation of most vulnerabilities. The bulk of safeguards, however, must come from manufacturers.
“It’s the responsibility of the companies offering these services to make sure they are secure,” says Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit. “To some degree, you have to trust the device you’re plugging into.”
Electrify America declined an interview request. With regard to the issues Malcolm and the Kilowatts documented, spokesperson Octavio Navarro wrote in an email that the incidents were isolated and the fixes were quickly deployed. In a statement, the company said, “Electrify America is constantly monitoring and reinforcing measures to protect ourselves and our customers and focusing on risk-mitigating station and…
As Baltimore County schools deal with ‘catastrophic’ ransomware attack, timeline for recovery still unclear
There are many options available that don’t require teachers to plug into the county system, said Avi Rubin, technical director of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute and a computer science professor. When classes closed down in March for the coronavirus, he said he was able to quickly put his class on a video conferencing platform.