The government of Germany is reported to have lost thousands of Euros in a cyberattack which appears to be of phishing genre.
News is out that from the past few days fake web links were created by cyber crooks that replicated the web portal run by NRW Ministry of Economic Affairs- aimed to distribute COVID 19 related financial help. The objective behind the creation of the links was to gather details of all the locals living in the region.
Then the hackers somehow posted the details collected from the populace of North-Rhine- Westphalia- a province in Germany and then induced the information into the NRW Ministry of Economic Affairs web portal to collect funds. As the cyber crooks managed to keep the bank accounts under their control, funds transferred between March 14th to April 9th were sent to the ones held by fraudsters.
German TV station Tagesschau claims that out of 360,000 cases of coronavirus govt aid, over 4000 requests could have been fake and believed to have been initiated by hackers.
NRW Government experts estimate that over ₤31.5 million could have been siphoned by the hackers as the payments varied between ₤9k for individuals and ₤25k for companies having more than 50 employees.
Coming to the second news, on Saturday last week, over 23 million usernames and passwords of players related to Canadian Toy Company ‘Ganz’ run website Webkinz World were reported to have leaked online.
In general, the website allows its users to play with their virtual pet by just inputting a code- similar to that of Disney’s Club Penguin.
The 1GB File which was leaked online contained over 23,000,000 pairs of the username and password credentials in encrypted form and experts say that the data breach could have taken place early this year.
The third news is related to a cryptocurrency stealing of $25 million from Uniswap and Lendf.me which are currency exchange & currency lending platforms respectively.
Security experts have tagged the attack as a “reentrancy attack” where hackers send fund requests in a loop before the original transaction is approved or declined. It’s suspected that the hackers exploited a vulnerability shared on GitHub last year for the fund stealing on both platforms.
Lendf.me could have lost over $24.5 million and Uniswap could have lost around $300,000- say, experts.
