News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Voatz + Hackers + US Supreme Court

That's not a good sum or mix indeed.  

https://www.cyberscoop.com/voatz-cfaa-su...ty-voting/

As a summary, Voatz is a company focused on letting users vote online via their cellphones. Last March the HackerOne group broke relations with Voatz. The reasoning behind this move was that Voatz wants to be able to sue them if they keep trying to vulnerate its mobile app. It believes that "uninvited" hackers should not mess with their software. The hackers tells us a totally different story where they see hacking as ethical for they just alerted Voatz of several bugs its app includes nowadays. The app company disagrees and made a request to the US Supreme Court to not make any modifications to the 1986 law that currently criminalizes any hacking that vulnerates computers without the owner's previous consent. So far Voatz motivations sound relatively logical and acceptable.

The thing is that HackerOne plus any other "independent" hacker or group would have almost no "job" to do anymore. You see, a company doesn't hire hackers every other day or so. There are other hackers that irrupt in a network without warning only to claim later they might release the information they extracted if their target doesn't contact them in a timely manner. Some people just do it for free and soon post their outcome on a board or even upload them to websites like GitHub and keep the repository open to anybody.
So how would the future of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act look like?

Middle East + North Africa + Ransomware

https://www.cyberscoop.com/ransomware-th..._networks/

The ransomware attacks used Thanos, a type of malware that surfaced earlier this year and has gained traction on underground forums.
Thanos is sold “as a service” to other hackers interested in deploying it. That can make the attacks harder to trace, and allow users to develop their own custom features.
Their version of Thanos had a “destructive” component designed to overwrite the computers’ master boot record (MBR), which tells a machine how to start up.

Things are getting ugly there. This malware allowed them to go to that sector of your computer where it keeps data on how to find your OS's! Later they corrupted it making it hard to get back in. They left a note asking for $20,000 but they didn't really make it obvious they wanted to get such a payment. Did they really want to get paid or not? An expert suspected they just pretended to let their victims think it was an actual ransomware attack instead of a deliberate attempt to destroy their PC's.

Why should we all be worried about this? Let a specialist tells us about that.

One of the advantages that Thanos offers is ease-of-use. Its clean control panel and adaptability to any kind of attack has made it very popular in underground forums.

So even for a not so experienced hacker it could become extremely easy to adapt it to his or her evil needs.