Japan enacts new Active Cyberdefense Law allowing for offensive cyber operations
Japan on Friday enacted a new law that would permit the country’s authorities to preemptively engage with adversaries through offensive cyber operations to ensure threats are suppressed before they cause significant damage. The new law, which was first mooted in 2022, is intended to help Japan strengthen its cyber defense “to a level equal to major Western powers” and marks a break from the country’s traditional approach to cyber defense, which had tracked closely to its Article 9 constitutional commitment to pacifism.
KrebsOnSecurity Hit With Near-Record 6.3 Tbps DDoS
KrebsOnSecurity last week was hit by a near record distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that clocked in at more than 6.3 terabits of data per second (a terabit is one trillion bits of data). The brief attack appears to have been a test run for a massive new Internet of Things (IoT) botnet capable of launching crippling digital assaults that few web destinations can withstand. Read on for more about the botnet, the attack, and the apparent creator of this global menace.
US Teen to Plead Guilty in PowerSchool Extortion Campaign
A 19-year-old college student in Massachusetts has agreed to plead guilty to a large-scale extortion scheme targeting PowerSchool, a school software provider. In an official document published on May 20 by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), Matthew D. Lane, a student at Assumption University in Worcester and a resident of Sterling, Massachusetts, has been accused of hacking into the computer networks of two US-based companies and extorting them for ransoms. He has agreed to plead guilty to one count each of cyber extortion conspiracy, cyber extortion, unauthorized access to protected computers and aggravated identity theft.
Two-Fifths of Americans Want to Ban Biometric Use
A majority of Americans have grave concerns about providing biometric information online and two-fifths (39%) argue the technology should be banned, according to new research from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC). The non-profit, which helps consumers and organizations mitigate the impact of identity crimes, polled 1177 individuals for its Biometric Consumer Attitude Report. It found that 87% were asked to provide a biometric identifier to verify their identity online in the past year, but 63% had “serious concerns” about doing so.
Major Facebook data leak reveals 1.2 billion user records, hacker claims
A massive 1.2 billion user record database was scraped from the Meta-owned Facebook by abusing one of the social media platform‘s application programming interfaces (APIs), attackers claim. The humongous database was posted on a popular data leak forum, with attackers claiming that the information is not a compilation of old records, but an entirely new dataset. If confirmed, the scrape could be one of the largest to come from Facebook. We have reached out to Meta for comment and will update the article once we receive a reply. The Cybernews research team investigated a data sample with records on 100,000 unique Facebook user records that attackers included in the post. Based on what‘s in the sample, not the complete dataset, the data appears legitimate.
