Three Universities in the United States have recently disclosed data breach incidents that exposed personally identifiable information of students and working staff. The three universities, Graceland University, Oregon State University, and Missouri Southern State University, stated that unknown intruders made unauthorized access to some of their employees’ email accounts.

The exposed information included, students’ full name, social security number, date of birth, address, telephone number, email address, parents/children, salary information, and financial aid information for enrollment.

The students and employees whose personal information was potentially stolen or accessed in the incident have been notified. The security professionals at the universities clarified that no evidence has been found of the impacted personal information being stolen or used in a malicious manner.

Oregon State University announced that 636 student records and family details of students containing sensitive information were potentially affected by the incident.

“OSU is continuing to investigate this matter and determine whether the cyber attacker viewed or copied these documents with personal information,” said Steve Clark, the university’s vice president for university relations and marketing. “While we have no indication at this time that the personal information was seen or used, OSU has notified these students and family members of this incident. And we have offered information about support services that are available, including 12 months of credit monitoring services that the university will enable at no cost.”

The Graceland University stated that it became aware of the unauthorized activity in which the hackers gained access to the email accounts of current employees, including the contents and attachments connected to those accounts. The officials said that the intruders accessed the individual accounts on March 29, 2019, and from April 1-30 and April 12-May 1, 2019, respectively. And, the Missouri Southern State University (MSSU) reported to the Office of the Vermont Attorney General about the cyber-attack triggered by a phishing email on January 9, 2019.

“The email contained a link, which, when clicked, allowed the perpetrator, to potentially copy that employee’s Office 365 account. Unfortunately, several employees fell victim to the fraudulent scheme. As soon as it detected this attack, the university contacted law enforcement and was directed to delay notification of potentially affected individuals until its investigation was complete. The university immediately engaged a leading forensic investigation firm to look into the matter and undertook enhancements to its already robust IT systems to block potential email exploitation, including a mass password reset of all employee Office 365 accounts,” the University said in a statement.

Recently, the Australian National University discovered a major data breach that affected students’ and University’s sensitive information. According to the University’s Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt, unknown cybercriminals attacked University’s systems and accessed personal information late in 2018, which was recently discovered by the University authorities on May 17, 2019. It’s believed that the hackers had unauthorized access to 19 years of significant amounts of information related to personal staff, students, and visitors.

The exposed information included names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, personal email addresses and emergency contact details, tax file numbers, payroll information, bank account details, passport details, and student academic records, according to Schmidt. However, Schmidt clarified that the data like credit card details, travel information, medical records, police checks, workers’ compensation, vehicle registration numbers, and some performance records were not affected by the incident.

The gaming industry has become an attractive target for cybercriminals with 12 billion credential stuffing attacks reported in the past 17 months (November 2017-March 2019).

According to the Cloud delivery network provider Akamai Technologies, the gaming community is among the most lucrative targets for hackers to make a quick profit. In its research report, “2019 State of the Internet/Security Web Attacks and Gaming Abuse” Akamai stated that there were 55 billion cases of credential stuffing attacks across all industries.

The report highlighted that nearly 67% of credential stuffing attacks target organizations based in the United States. It stated that Russia is the second largest source of application attacks and China is ranked as the fourth highest source country. On the other hand, the United Kingdom ranked as the second highest targeted country with Japan, Canada, Australia, and Italy are all also among the countries most targeted.

“One reason that we believe the gaming industry is an attractive target for hackers is that criminals can easily exchange in-game items for profit,” Martin McKeay, Security Researcher at Akamai said in a statement. “Furthermore, gamers are a niche demographic known for spending money, so their financial status is also a tempting target.”

The attackers look for valid accounts and unique skins in popular games to hack them and sell. Akamai said that hackers focus on more valued video game accounts that are connected to a valid credit card or other financial resources. After compromising the account, the criminal can purchase additional items, such as currency used within the game, and then sell the hacked account at a higher price.

According to a research, young gamers are increasingly turning into hackers to commit cybercrime. The research found that 82% of teens and young adults recruited by online criminals had developed their cybercrime skills through video gaming.

The UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) held a forum and published a special report about the problem. The agency report looks at ways to identify those at risk of hacking, how to intervene before they go too far, and then inspire them to pursue a career in IT security.

Scammers are making phishing attacks, by abusing Google Calendar services, to trick users into giving away sensitive information like passwords, card details, and other financial data. The threat intelligence and cybersecurity firm Kaspersky stated that it detected many unsolicited pop-up calendar notifications sent to Gmail users by cybercriminals as a sophisticated spam email attack.

“Spam and phishing threats that exploit non-traditional attack vectors can be lucrative for criminals, as they can often successfully trick users who might not fall for a more obvious attack. This is particularly true when it comes to trusted legitimate services, such as email calendar features, which can be exploited through so-called “calendar phishing,” Kaspersky explained.

The calendar phishing emails exploit the automatic addition and notification of calendar invitations feature for people using Gmail on their mobiles, according to Kaspersky.

The scam occurs when an attacker sends an unsolicited calendar invitation carrying a link to a phishing URL and encourage the recipient to click on the link. The user then redirected to a fake website, appears to be original, that features a simple questionnaire and offered a prize after completion. The victim will be asked to fill in personal details like name, phone number, address, and bank details in order to steal the victim’s money or identity.

“The ‘calendar scam’ is a very effective scheme, as most people have become used to receiving spam messages from emails or messenger apps,” said Maria Vergelis, a security researcher at Kaspersky. “But this may not be the case when it comes to the Calendar app, which has the main purpose to organize information rather than transfer it. So far, the sample we’ve seen contains text displaying an obviously weird offer, but as it happens, every simple scheme becomes more elaborate and trickier with time.”

The security also suggested the users turn off the ‘automatically add invitations’ option to the Google calendar to avoid calendar scams. According to a research by Menlo Labs, a company that provides cybersecurity solutions, employees at financial services firms in the United States and the United Kingdom are being targeted by a malicious email campaign.

The researchers revealed that cybercriminals are storing malicious payloads on storage.googleapis.com, the domain of the Google Cloud Storage service. The email campaign might have been active in the United States and the United Kingdom since August 2018. The victims received emails containing malicious links to archive files, which appears to be genuine and related to Google’s cloud storage service. The research report stated the attackers used two types of payloads to compromise PCs and the endpoints by duping employees into clicking on malicious links.

The popular messaging app Telegram recently suffered a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service attack) attack that affected the users in the United States, Hong Kong, and in other countries. Telegram, well-known for its encryption, privacy, and self-destructive private messages, stated the users might have experienced connection issues due to the attack.

Telegram took to Twitter to notify its users. “We’re currently experiencing a powerful DDoS attack, Telegram users in the Americas and some users from other countries may experience connection issues,” Telegram said in a Twitter post. Describing the attack Telegram said, “A DDoS is a “Distributed Denial of Service attack”: your servers get GADZILLIONS of garbage requests which stop them from processing legitimate requests. Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald’s in front of you – and each is ordering a whopper.”

“The server is busy telling the whopper lemmings they came to the wrong place – but there are so many of them that the server can’t even see you to try and take your order. To generate these garbage requests, bad guys use “botnets” made up of computers of unsuspecting users which were infected with malware at some point in the past. This makes a DDoS similar to the zombie apocalypse: one of the whopper lemmings just might be your grandpa,” Telegram tweeted.

While confirming that users’ data was not misused in the attack, Telegram said, “There’s a bright side: All of these lemmings are there just to overload the servers with extra work – they can’t take away your BigMac and coke. Your data is safe.”

Meanwhile, the Telegram founder Pavel Durov stated the Chinese government may have been behind the DDoS attack. Durov described the incident as a “state actor-sized DDoS” which came mainly from IP addresses located in China. The attack coincided with the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, where people are using Telegram to avoid detection while coordinating their protests.

Recently, Pavel Durov criticized WhatsApp after it revealed a vulnerability in its network system that allowed hackers to install spyware via an infected WhatsApp voice call. In his blog post, Durov wrote an article, Why WhatsApp will never be secure, criticizing WhatsApp on its latest data breach.

“This news didn’t surprise me though. Last year WhatsApp had to admit they had a very similar issue a single video call via WhatsApp was all a hacker needed to get access to your phone’s entire data,” Pavel Durov stated in his blog post. Every time WhatsApp must fix a critical vulnerability in their app, a new one seems to appear in its place. All their security issues are conveniently suitable for surveillance and look and work a lot like backdoors.”

“Unlike Telegram, WhatsApp is not open source, so there’s no way for a security researcher to easily check whether there are backdoors in its code. Not only does WhatsApp not publish its code, they do the exact opposite: WhatsApp deliberately obfuscates their apps’ binaries to make sure no one is able to study them thoroughly,” Durov added.