News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Facebook Parent Meta to Cut Over 11,000 Jobs; Zuckerberg Concedes He Got Trends ‘Wrong’

Facebook parent company Meta will cut more than 11,000 jobs, reducing its workforce by about 13 percent, as it faces a revenue crunch as advertisers pull back amid high inflation and a wobbly economy.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the cuts in a Nov. 9 blog post, in which he took the blame for overestimating the company’s growth prospects and overextending investments.
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The Facebook founder went on to say that not only has the pandemic-era e-commerce boom abated, but a tanking economy, growing competition, and a pullback in advertising dollars have all “caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected.”

In addition to cutting jobs, Meta is also slashing discretionary spending and extending its existing hiring freeze through the first quarter of 2023.

The company also is scaling back budgets, reducing its real estate footprint, and looking for more areas in which to cut costs in the coming months. Zuckerberg said one of the changes would involve Meta staff who rarely come into the office having to start sharing desks.
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Meta has seen its shares plunge in recent months and is down about 70 percent year-to-date. At its peak in September 2021, the stock was trading at around $380 per share.

Meta shares rose about 5 percent to $101.47 on Nov. 9 following the announcement.
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Zuckerberg’s announcement follows thousands of layoffs at other major tech companies, including Microsoft and Twitter, as soaring inflation and rapidly rising interest rates have turned a pandemic tech boom into a bust.

Ransomware costs top $1 billion as White House inks new threat-sharing initiative

U.S. financial institutions observed nearly $1.2 billion in costs associated with ransomware attacks in 2021, a nearly 200 percent increase over the previous year, according to data reported by banks to the U.S. Treasury Department and released in a report Tuesday.
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The Treasury report that was first reported by CNN underscores that curbing ransomware represents a key challenge in Washington’s fractious relationship with Moscow. Of the top five ransomware variants reported during the second half of 2021, four are connected to Russia, Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN, said in its report, while cautioning that it cannot definitively attribute the variants to Moscow.

The data released Tuesday represents suspicious transactions that American banks have flagged to U.S. regulators as potentially connected to ransomware, and, for that reason, experts caution that the data from the Treasury Department offers only a partial picture of the broader ransomware industry.
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The data is limited, however, and “is not a complete representation of all ransomware attacks or payments,” the agency noted. The dollar figures include extortion attempts, attempted transactions and payments that were unpaid, the agency said.
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The Biden administration has attempted to get more aggressive with ransomware groups by sanctioning cryptocurrency exchanges, seizing cryptocurrency proceeds from attacks and carrying out offensive operations against ransomware infrastructure.

Four-year cybercrime campaign targeting African banks netted $30 million

A French-speaking cybercrime group pulled off a series of heists over the past four years, netting perhaps as much as $30 million from firms in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Using a combination of high-quality spear phishing and off-the-shelf tools, the group has carried out more than 30 attacks targeting banks, financial services and telecommunications firms, according to research on the group’s activities published Thursday.

Dubbed “OPERA1ER,” the group works its way into various accounts, gains control of them and then moves money into accounts it controls, before cashing out primarily through ATM withdrawals, researchers with the cybersecurity firm Group-IB concluded in a report shared with CyberScoop.

As an example of the group’s sprawling operations, one of the attacks utilized what the report described as a “vast network of 400 mule accounts” — accounts controlled by money mules hired to cash out stolen funds.
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OPERA1ER’s activities demonstrate the global nature of this risk. The group has successfully targeted banks and other institutions in at least 15 countries: Ivory Coast, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Gabon, Niger, Nigeria, Paraguay, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Togo and Argentina, according to Group-IB’s findings.
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Starting in 2019, Tom Ueltschi, a Swiss security researcher, began publicly identifying information related to a group he called “DESKTOP-Group,” including email headers, malware hashes and command and control details. In 2020, the Dubai-based cybersecurity firm Rewterz shared hashes from a file used by a group it tracked as “Common Raven.” In 2021, SWIFT, the messaging system used by banks for international transactions, published a bulletin on activity connected to the group.