Tomáš Foltýn

A number of text-based apps crashed, became unresponsive or entered an endless bootloop when attempting to show the otherwise little-used character from a language that is spoken by some 75 million people.

A further breakdown of the overall figures shows that, in all, the actual cost hinges on a number of variables. The factors that enter heavily into the equation include attack types and their frequency, along with the organization’s size and even the country in which an organization is based.

This hack is said to be reminiscent of a particularly brazen bank cyber-heist from February 2016, in which hackers successfully pilfered $81 million from the account of the central bank of Bangladesh at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The vulnerability of critical infrastructure, including energy grids, to cyberattacks has been a growing concern worldwide. Many nations have been scrambling to improve their defenses vis-à-vis threats faced by services that are critical to the continuity of our daily lives.

A record-high proportion of organizations worldwide (67%) said that they had been breached at some point, up from 56% in the report’s previous edition.

Smart TVs afford us the opportunity to use them for purposes that are more commonly associated with computers. In fact, that’s what these TVs have become – internet-connected ‘computers’, much like mobile phones. It would no doubt help if we thought of them as such and treated them accordingly.

If undetected by a user’s security solution or content- or ad-blocker, the script ran in the background unbeknown to the user until the webpage was closed. A number of the affected websites, including that of the ICO, were also offline for hours in the aftermath of the attack.

According to US authorities, the enterprise aimed at becoming the premier destination for the buying and selling of stolen payment card data and forged identification documents. It is believed that the losses that the Infraud Organization had intended to cause were north of $2.2 billion.

The investigation showed that the tool, which required little technical knowledge to deploy, had over 8,600 users in 78 countries. Victims are believed to be in the thousands.