Security News for the Week Ending November 20, 2020

Oracle POS Back Door Discovered

Oracle bought the Micros Point of Sale System a few years ago and now needs to deal with the challenges from that. The newest challenge is a modular back door that affects the 3700 POS series. It is used by hundreds of thousands of hotels, restaurants, bars and other hospitality locations. The malware, which has been around for a year, can download new modules to increase the damage it can do. Credit: Help Net Security

New Facebook Feature

Okay, many people use Facebook a lot while others find it useless. Ransomware extortion artists have found a new use. Hack Facebook advertiser’s accounts and buy ads telling victims to pay up. These ads get taken down but not before someone (else) gets to pay for them and not before the victim gets outed very publicly. Credit: Brian Krebs

White House Fires Chris Krebs, As Expected

As anticipated, the White House fired Chris Krebs, head of DHS’s CISA unit. Krebs was the person who was in charge of protecting the 2020 elections and, by all accounts, did a great job. Part of the White House’s upset with Krebs is the web site he ran called rumor control where he debunked the myths about election fraud that the White House has been peddling. The good news is that he will be able to find a job at any number of consulting companies making double or triple what he was making at DHS. This is a loss for the country. Credit: Bleeping Computer

Ransomware: 56% of Organizations Get Hit

56% of organizations responding to a recent survey say that they have been hit by ransomware in the last year. 27% of those hit chose to pay the ransom with an average payout to the hackers of just over a million bucks.

87% of the respondents said that nation-state sponsored cyberattacks are far more common than people think, posing the single biggest threat (check your cyber insurance for an exclusion for that). Credit: Help Net Security

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