The bill is known as the Homeland and Cyber Threat Act (HACT act), a reintroduced version of a bill initially introduced in August 2019. This year the HACT act bill was reintroduced by Reps. Jack Bergman (MI-01), Colin Allred (TX-32), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01), Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA-03), Joe Neguse (CO-02), and Andy Kim (NJ-03).

The year 2020 saw an increase in the sophistication of threats due to the application of emerging technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and 5G, and especially from greater tactical cooperation among hacker groups and state actors.

The campaign was discovered by Bitdefender Antispam Lab researchers who discovered an ongoing phishing campaign targeting Coinbase platform users in an attempt to steal their account credentials and drain their cryptocurrency wallets.

The cryptomining botnet that is operated by Lemon_Duck is now using Microsoft Exchange ProxyLogon exploits in attacks against unpatched servers. The malware is known for installing XMRig Monero (XMR) CPU coinminers on infected devices to mine cryptocurrency for the botnet’s owners.

The attack reportedly took place on the third of February by a cybercrime gang known as ‘Cuba ransomware’. The group reportedly also stole unencrypted files and deployed the ransomware. The group claims to have stolen; “financial documents, correspondence with bank employees, account movements, balance sheets, and tax documents.” The attack was reportedly not known until the hackers began selling AFTS’ stolen data on their data leak site.

In the coming weeks, President Joe Biden plans to release an executive order that Anne Neuberger said will include about eight measures intended to address security gaps exposed by the hack. Biden’s administration also plans to increase the budget of CISA by 30%.

A subsequent breakdown per state shows California leading the table with the highest number of Hacking and IT cases with 49; Texas follows in second with 4; while New York has 39 breaches, Florida and Pennsylvania have 38 breaches each.

The cyber-attack was noticed by private cybersecurity company FireEye in December. The attack was found to be a wide-ranging intrusion into multiple systems of federal government agencies by a group known as UNC2452, who are suspected to be Russian.

According to German authorities, the joint operation was months in the works and was part of a larger investigation that saw the takedown of website hosting provider CyberBunker in southwestern Germany in September 2019.

The data stolen from EMA first appeared on various hacking forums on December 31st, 2020, with the data being originally stolen on December 9th, 2020. Amongst the data released include email screenshots, peer review information, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, and Word documents.