Check Point’s ZoneAlarm suffers alarming breach and some very strange goings-on in a school in Manchester. But first The Labour Party is under a massive DDOS attack.
Labour is under attack.
Starting out on Monday the 11th November Labour has been under attack from a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) causing traffic to spike to their computer systems in the hope that they will flood the traffic so much they will go offline.
What is a DDOS attack?
A group named The Lizard Party have fessed up to the attack which to date has not been successful due to the party utilising Cloudflare technology which has 15 times to network capacity of the largest DDoS attack ever recorded.
Our thoughts…
By using Cloudflare Labour is protecting its systems from these types of attack it is however concerning that in the runup to the general election that political parties are under attack.
More on that here – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50388879
ZoneAlarm’s Customer Data Breach
The consumer arm of Check Point has suffered a serious breach whereby hackers have been able to access its web forum.
Over 4000 of its customer have had their data compromised including names, email addresses, passwords (hashed) as well as their dates of birth.
ZoneAlarm have since sent out an email to their customer advising them to change their passwords immediately. An excerpt from their email is as below.
“The website became inactive in order to fix the problem and will resume as soon as it is fixed. You will be requested to reset your password once joining the forum. ZoneAlarm is conducting a thorough investigation into the whereabouts of this incident and views this as a serious matter.”
The cause of this breach was running outdated vBulletin software containing a zero-day vulnerability.
Is your software up to date to prevent this from happening to you? How’s your security looking? – https://re-solution.co.uk/security
Strange goings-on in a Manchester school…
A Manchester higher education college has become the latest public sector cyber-attack victim after a teacher’s email account was hacked this week.
Strangely the criminals sent out email messages to pupils of the sixth form advising that they would be attacked by Israel.
The emails advised students that the sixth form was closed due to a gas leak and that Adolf Hitler would be visiting.
Email transcript as below.
“Hi students, in the upcoming week we will be receiving a visit from the man himself, Hitler.
“This is why we emailed as a gas leak, as we are unsure of his mental status, as a precaution. Please bring a gas mask in, just in case he tried anything dodgy, thank you. Sincerely, Blue Power Ranger.”
The college released a statement saying: “The college is aware that overnight, emails have been sent to students from a currently unknown source.
“We are working with the police and college network team to identify the source and address the situation.
“We apologise for any distress or upset this may have caused. Please be reassured that we are taking this situation very seriously. College is open as normal.”
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