News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Cybercriminals Steal Records of 500,000 Chicago Students in Huge Data Breach

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has revealed that nearly half a million students and over 50,000 staff members have fallen prey to a massive data breach involving the theft of personal information via a ransomware attack.
...
The stolen student records span a four-year period from 2015 to 2019 and include name, date of birth, gender, grade level, school, student ID number, information about the courses students had taken, and student scores from performance tasks used for teacher evaluations.

The staff records that were involved in the breach include name, school, employee ID number, CPS email address, and information about courses taught during the four-year span.
...
CPS said that the vendor, Battelle for Kids, had taken mitigation measures to reduce the likelihood of similar data breaches in the future, including enhancing network security and hiring a third-party security firm to provide “up-to-date defenses and industry-leading practices” in terms of cybersecurity.

And just as I had reported not long ago...

Costa Rican president claims collaborators are aiding
Conti's ransomware extortion efforts

“We are at war and that is not an exaggeration,” Chaves said, according to a Google translation. “The war is against an international terrorist group.” He added that “there are very clear indications that people inside the country are collaborating with Conti,” but did not share details.
...
Over the weekend messages posted to Conti’s website captured by Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow called on the people of Costa Rica to “organize rallies” to force the government to pay and also that “we are determined to overthrow the government by means of a cyber attack.” The attackers demanded $20 million — doubling the previous demand of $10 million — and also claimed the decryption keys would be deleted within a week.
...
Chaves said Monday that the government has assembled a “SWAT Team” from various government agencies to handle the April 17 ransomware attack that has affected at least 27 institutions — nine of them “significantly,” according to La Nación — and that there is still no full diagnosis of the magnitude of the situation.

Mandiant: Belarusian disinformation operation
pushes phony organ harvesting tale

A hacking group associated with the government of Belarus and aligned with Russian interests “leveraged compromised assets” to push a false story about an alleged Polish criminal ring harvesting organs from Ukrainian refugees to illegally traffic in the European Union, researchers with the cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Thursday.

The previously unattributed activity was the work of Ghostwriter, which Mandiant formally linked to the Belarusian government in November 2021.
...
Targets of the operations include Ukrainian citizens and those in other European countries, domestic audiences in China and Iran, but also the domestic Russian populace — “underscoring Russia’s need to sell the war to its own people,” the Mandiant researchers wrote.

Well, I cannot support fake news, yet, I find it important to investigate  those claims first. It is better to confirm that no refugee has been endangered by any third party like some phony NGO, probably pretending to work for UN or the Ukrainian government, than just closing our eyes mainly because the accusations do not stick with the official version.

Keep in mind how Joe Biden was pretending to control the (cyber) narrative via his own "Ministry of Truth" a la George Orwell.