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Tag: cyber attack

  • Cyber attack on London councils stops tax revenue reaching Treasury – Tech Digest

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    A crippling cyber attack on three of London’s wealthiest councils is threatening to block billions in tax revenue from reaching the Treasury.

    The co-ordinated strike has paralyzed IT systems across the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster City Council, and Hammersmith & Fulham. By halting mandatory local authority searches, the attack has effectively frozen the property market in areas where home prices are among the highest in the world.

    In the 2024-25 tax year, these three boroughs generated approximately £1.5 billion in stamp duty. With hundreds of sales now stalled or collapsing, experts warn that a significant portion of this revenue is being diverted from government coffers.

    The crisis began in late November when hackers breached the shared IT infrastructure. While Westminster has attempted to process applications manually, Kensington and Chelsea admitted that hundreds of planning applications and land searches are now “in limbo.”

    Mortgage lenders typically refuse to release funds without the results of these municipal searches. Consequently, purchase and remortgage transactions have ground to a halt. Legal experts at Farrer & Co confirmed that the ongoing delays are preventing many high-value deals from proceeding.

    The impact extends beyond the Treasury to local residents. Homeowners planning renovations have been told they may wait months for approval, while major developments – including thousands of new homes – face significant delays.

    Developers warn that the inability to “discharge” planning conditions is causing costs to spiral. There are also fears that some builders may press on illegally, leading to a surge in planning breaches that the councils are currently unable to enforce.

    Kensington and Chelsea has already reported a direct loss of £200,000 in land charge income. To keep the market moving, officials are considering asking lenders to accept indemnity insurance instead of official searches, a move that carries its own legal risks.

    Cyber security teams from the Metropolitan Police and the National Cyber Security Centre are currently working to restore the networks. However, officials warn that systems are being brought back “very cautiously,” and a full recovery could take months.

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    Chris Price

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  • Cloudflare outage was not caused by a cyber attack

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    Cloudflare wrongly suspected that the widespread outage that took numerous websites offline on November 18 was caused by a DDoS attack, the company’s CEO has admitted. In his blog post that breaks down what happened, however, Matthew Prince explained that after realizing their mistake, his team was able to fix the issue. “The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind,” he wrote. It was instead caused by a change to its database systems’ permissions, which led to an issue with a file used by its Bot Management system.

    The company’s Bot Management system uses a machine learning model to score bots for every request they make when they crawl Cloudflare’s network. Its clients rely on those bot scores to decide whether to allow or to block specific bots from accessing their websites. One the uses of having bot scores is being able to block AI companies’ bots so they can’t use a website’s content to train their LLMs. In July, Cloudflare launched an experiment called “pay per crawl,” which allows website owners to let an AI bot crawl their pages if they get paid for access.

    Prince said the model relies on a “feature” configuration file to make a prediction on whether a bot request was automated or not. The feature file is refreshed every few minutes, and a change in the underlying mechanism generating that file caused a change in its size that triggered the error. “As a result, HTTP 5xx error codes were returned by the core proxy system that handles traffic processing for our customers, for any traffic that depended on the bots module,” Prince wrote.

    This recent event has been Cloudflare’s worst outage in years. The company said it hasn’t had an outage that has “caused the majority of core traffic to stop flowing through [its] network” since 2019. Prince apologized for the issue on behalf of his team.

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  • China Accuses US of Cyber Breaches at National Time Centre

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    China has accused the U.S. of stealing secrets and infiltrating the country’s national time centre, warning that serious breaches could have disrupted communication networks, financial systems, the power supply and the international standard time.

    The U.S. National Security Agency has been carrying out a cyber attack operation on the National Time Service Center over an extended period of time, China’s State Security Ministry said in a statement on its WeChat account on Sunday.

    The ministry said it found evidence tracing stolen data and credentials as far back as 2022, which were used to spy on the staff’s mobile devices and network systems at the centre.

    The U.S. intelligence agency had “exploited a vulnerability” in the messaging service of a foreign smartphone brand to access staff members’ devices in 2022, the ministry said, without naming the brand.

    The national time centre is a research institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences that generates, maintains and broadcasts China’s standard time.

    The ministry’s investigation also found that the United States launched attacks on the centre’s internal network systems and attempted to attack the high-precision ground-based timing system in 2023 and 2024.

    The U.S. embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    China and the U.S. have increasingly traded accusations of cyberattacks in the past few years, each portraying the other as its primary cyber threat.

    The latest accusations come amid renewed trade tensions over China’s expanded rare earths export controls, and the U.S. threatening to further raise tariffs on Chinese goods.

    Reporting by Liz Lee; Editing by Michael Perry

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    Reuters

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  • Unbelievable facts

    Unbelievable facts

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    A malicious ZIP file circulating online is 42 KB compressed but expands to 4.5 petabytes when…

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  • MGM Suit Against FTC Over Cyber Attacks • This Week in Gambling

    MGM Suit Against FTC Over Cyber Attacks • This Week in Gambling

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     April 18, 2024



    The cyber attacks in Vegas last year are back in the news, as an MGM suit against the Federal Trade Commission has been filed over its investigation into the matter. Those attacks crippled Caesars and MGM properties, and the suit filed in Washington federal court targets both the FTC and Lina Khan, the FTC chair.

    The MGM suit is pursuing “injunctive and declaratory relief” against the FTC. They allege that that the actions taken by the FTC and Khan have infringed upon their rights as guaranteed by the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. This clause mandates that entities subject to governmental actions are entitled to a hearing before an impartial tribunal. It also ensures equitable treatment under the law.

    During the attacks, MGM found itself compelled to shut down specific systems across its properties.  It seems that Khan was actually staying at an MGM property in Las Vegas during the attacks and asked an employee how the company was handling data security, and that employee stated he did not know.

    In addition to the MGM suit, the company filed a motion to disqualify Khan based on her “personal involvement in the subject matter under investigation.” Furthermore, MGM disclosed its status as a defendant in 15 consumer class actions, wherein Khan is identified as a potential civil plaintiff and a potential witness.

    The FTC rejected both motions on 1 April 2024, leading to the MGM suit. The company stated that “It is fundamentally contrary to the Fifth Amendment’s guarantees of due process and equal protection for the FTC to subject MGM to an investigation premised on regulatory provisions that are inapplicable on their face.”