Tag Archive for: pushes

Government pushes for tighter cyber security after Optus hack

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optus

Source: Bianca De Marchi / AAP Image

The Australian government will be rolling out new cyber security reforms off the back of the Optus cyberattack, Minister for Cybersecurity Clare O’Neil has announced.

The changes are said to be unveiled some time this week, and are expected to focus on infrastructure that will allow financial institutions to be more swiftly informed when a data breach occurs so they can stop personal data being used to access those particular accounts.

“Australian companies must do all they can to protect their customers’ data. I will have much more to say in coming days about the Optus cyber attack and what steps need to be taken in the future,” Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security, Clare O’Neil, said on Twitter.

Shadow Minister for Cyber Security James Paterson and Shadow Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews are also pushing for sign off on a private members bill. 

First proposed by the former government back in February, it would enforce harsher punishments for hackers that target essential services and infrastructure.

If passed, it would become an aggravated offense to buy and sell stolen data that could result in up to 25 years imprisonment.

“It’s critically important that Australian businesses take this issue seriously because it can have profound implications not just for their business and not just for their shareholders, but for their customers and our wider economy and society,” Paterson said in a press conference on Monday.

Both Paterson and Andrews were critical of the Labor government and Optus in the press conference, referring to the yet-to-be-announced reforms as “reactive”.

“This looks like a case of the…

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Borat RAT pushes ransomware, DDoS, spyware • The Register

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A new remote access trojan (RAT) dubbed “Borat” doesn’t come with many laughs but offers bad actors a menu of cyberthreats to choose from.

RATs are typically used by cybercriminals to get full control of a victim’s system, enabling them to access files and network resources and manipulate the mouse and keyboard. Borat does all this and also delivers features to enable hackers to run ransomware, distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) and other online assaults and to install spyware, according to researchers at cybersecurity biz Cyble.

“The Borat RAT provides a dashboard to Threat Actors (TAs) to perform RAT activities and also has an option to compile the malware binary for performing DDoS and ransomware attacks on the victim’s machine,” the researchers wrote in a blog post, noting the malware is being made available for sale to hackers.

Borat – named after the character made famous by actor Sacha Baron Cohen in two comedy films – comes with the standard requisite of RAT features in a package that includes such functions as builder binary, server certificate and supporting modules.

It’s the other options that make it more interesting. Bad actors can use the malware to deliver ransomware that will encrypt files on a victim’s system and demand a ransom, including the ability to create a ransom note on the targeted machine. There also is code in Borat that will decrypt the files in the system once the ransom is paid.

Additionally, the RAT includes code for launching a DDoS attack, in which a website or server is overwhelmed by a wave of messages, slowing down responses and services to legitimate users and sometimes forcing the site to shut down. Often it takes paying the threat actor money to shut off the DDoS attack.

On top of that, there is a range of remote surveillance capabilities that enable hackers to spy on the system…

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