Category: Greece

A cyber-attack has made the staff of Idaho Falls Community Hospitals to divert emergency ambulances elsewhere as it is struggling to mitigate the risks associated with the incident. Although the 88-bed hospital is taking good care of the inhouse patients and staffers, it is unable to share the same care to the new patients, as its digital infrastructure is crippling and its data systems are down to render any update.

Brian Ziel, the spokesperson of the hospital admitted that the healthcare unit was serving its patients with pen and paper and is doing its best to recover from the incident at the earliest.

However, Ziel is not aware of any ransom demand and so is skeptical to declare the attack as a ransomware genre.

Mountain View Hospital, serving under the ownership of Idaho Falls Community Hospital is also facing the same challenge and is taking necessary measures to cope up with the incident.

Meanwhile, on a separate note, the Supreme Court of Greece has ordered a scientific probe into the halt of Greek high school exams by a cyber-attack. Consecutively, the attack was caused for two days and was targeting the database containing the questionnaire that was supposed to be answered by the students for this academic year.

Isidoros Dogiakos, the Public Prosecutor at Supreme Court issued a statement on this note and said that the incident was a sort of emergency and so will be probed down to the core by the law enforcement.

Prima Facie revealed that the database was disrupted on Monday and Tuesday of this week by overwhelming amount of web traffic targeting the server. And reliable sources from the Education Ministry suggest that a ransomware gang that is also into the launch of DDoS attacks is suspected behind the incident and its prime motive was to cancel the exams.

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The New York Times is reporting that a US citizen’s phone was hacked by the Predator spyware.

A U.S. and Greek national who worked on Meta’s security and trust team while based in Greece was placed under a yearlong wiretap by the Greek national intelligence service and hacked with a powerful cyberespionage tool, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and officials with knowledge of the case.

The disclosure is the first known case of an American citizen being targeted in a European Union country by the advanced snooping technology, the use of which has been the subject of a widening scandal in Greece. It demonstrates that the illicit use of spyware is spreading beyond use by authoritarian governments against opposition figures and journalists, and has begun to creep into European democracies, even ensnaring a foreign national working for a major global corporation.

The simultaneous tapping of the target’s phone by the national intelligence service and the way she was hacked indicate that the spy service and whoever implanted the spyware, known as Predator, were working hand in hand.

The Greek journalist Thanasis Koukakis was spied on by his own government, with a commercial spyware product called “Predator.” That product is sold by a company in North Macedonia called Cytrox, which is in turn owned by an Israeli company called Intellexa.

Koukakis is suing Intellexa.

The lawsuit filed by Koukakis takes aim at Intellexa and its executive, alleging a criminal breach of privacy and communication laws, reports Haaretz. The founder of Intellexa, a former Israeli intelligence commander named Taj Dilian, is listed as one of the defendants in the suit, as is another shareholder, Sara Hemo, and the firm itself. The objective of the suit, Koukakis says, is to spur an investigation to determine whether a criminal indictment should be brought against the defendants.

Why does it always seem to be Israel? The world would be a much safer place if that government stopped this cyberweapons arms trade from inside its borders.

Ragnar Locker Ransomware gang has officially declared that they are responsible for the disruption of servers related to a Greece-based gas operator DESFA. And reports are in that Ragnar Locker Gang is demanding $12 million to free up data from encryption.

DESFA released a press statement that it became a victim of a ransomware attack on Saturday last week and assured that its business continuity plan will surely bail them out of the present situation, without paying a penny.

Natural Gas supply hasn’t been hit by the malware, however, some systems on the administration side were reportedly disrupted.

FBI issued a statement in May this year that Ragnar Locker was responsible for the disruption of systems across 53 organizations in the past two years, including 35 from the critical sector of the United States.

Interestingly, the law enforcement agency has determined that Ragnar Locker ransomware spreading group avoids putting forward its ransom demand to victims from Azerbaijan, Armenian, Belorussian, Russian, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Moldavian, Turkmen, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and Georgia and instead terminates its infection from that system or network, and the reason for this is yet to be probed.

NOTE- Donuts Leaks, a new data extortion group is also linked to Ragnar Locker and is responsible to target Sheppard Robson, the UK-based Architectural company, and Construction giant Sando and the same group was responsible to announce to the world the digital attack on DESFA.

It is worth noting that the cyber attack comes at the point when gas suppliers in Europe are facing fuel supply shortages because of the cut-off of trade ties with Russia over fuel supply. As the former is supporting Ukraine in the war with Putin and so come winter, the public is expected to be plagued by troubles such as power cuts, fuel prices soaring, rationing, and of course load-shedding blackouts.

Meantime, Technology Giant Microsoft issued a statement yesterday that 80% of ransomware attacks are expected to occur because of system configuration errors, and the same was rendered in its latest Cyber Signals report.

The Satya Nadella-led company has also reiterated that the proliferation of ransomware as a service could bring complications for companies that aren’t focusing much on cybersecurity.

Highlighting the achievements made by Microsoft’s Digital Crimes unit, which have been combating cybercrime since 2008, the Windows OS offering firm stated that its security teams have removed over 531,000 unique phishing URLs and about 5400 phishing kits between July 2021 to June 2022.

 

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