A data breach was reported by the City of Johannesburg on Thursday, 24 October 2019 which is said to have affected several of their customer-facing systems.
In a tweet posted after 11PM, the city said “The incident is currently being investigated by City of Joburg cyber security experts, who have taken immediate and appropriate action to reinforce security measures to mitigate any potential impacts.”
F-Secure Travel Tips
The summer holidays are fast approaching and with them come potential security dangers of travelling with devices. Fennel Aurora from F-Secure has some best practice advice to help protect devices, data and privacy while travelling:
DDos attack affects numerous local ISPs
Due to a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack which hit South Africa last week and which was initially thought to have been targeting South African Banks, numerous Internet Service Providers (ISP)s have subsequently reported service outages.
MyBroadband reported on Sunday, 27 October 2019 that several services providers, namely Afrihost, Axxess, Webafrica and Liquid Telecom were suffering from intermittent connectivity issues. Afrihost CEO Gian Visser commented that “It looks like the attacks are destined to several networks advertised by Liquid Telecom and are not specific to Echo or Afrihost”.
Vulnerabilities inside the network
The advanced technology in today’s day and age has allowed for our network security devices to do a good job of protecting our networks from malicious malware and criminal hackers.
Many software products and networks help keep the unwanted out. However most times the actual cyber threat is already inside of the network.
Latest Cyber-Attack Threats
Avast Breached – Abiss
Major cyber security firm, Avast suffered an intrusion recently which may have been targeting CCleaner to initiate a possible supply chain attack. This might have been a repeated attempt of the 2017 CCleaner breach in which 2.27 million users downloaded a tainted version via the official update channel.
Nord VPN Data Centre Breach
Nord VPN found themselves in a similar situation to Avast when one of their datacentres was breached using, yet again, forgotten VPN credentials which were compromised.
Call centre security scam claims R75500
Retired businessman Doug Varey reportedly fell victim to a security scam which cost him R75500 (£4000). Mr Varey signed up to a computer security protection popup offering 12 years of protection for R10500 (£556) or R875 (£46) per year, which led to him being contacted by the associated call centre a few months later.
This bulletin is intended to increase the security awareness in organisations by providing useful information to help enhance security and safety when using computing devices and the Internet.
Be sure to consider some of the cyber threats out there and consider these tips for protecting yourself and your devices. Until our next mailer, you can check out all the great resources we have available on our website.