Newswire was Hacked and $100M of information stolen

How valuable can information be to cyber-criminals? Newswire was hacked and $100 million of information was stolen.

Recently, the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced civil fraud charges against 32 defendants for taking part in a scheme to profit from stolen nonpublic information about corporate earnings announcements.  Two of the cyber-criminals allegedly hacked into Newswire services which runs Business Wire, PR Newswire and Marketwired to obtain the information. Cybercriminals then allegedly traded using this information and it generated more than $100 million in illegal profits.

According to the release, the cyber criminals concealed the intrusions by using a proxy servers to mask their identities. They also setup their presence to look like Newswire service employees and clients. The cyber-criminals then went to market and recruited industry traders with a video showing their ability to steal the earnings information before its public release resulting in planned trading.

Unfortunately there was a trail resulting in traders paying based on profits or even giving hackers access to their accounts to monitor the trading and ensure that they are being paid the appropriate profits. The traders tried to conceal their illegal activity by establishing multiple accounts in a variety of names and funneling money to the hackers as payments for other services.

What is a proxy hacking?

Proxy hacking (proxy hijacking) supplant an authentic Web page in a search engine’s index and search results pages and redirect users requesting the targeted page to a malicious or fraudulent website.

How do you protect yourself from proxy hacking?

Talk to you IT support services or managed IT services provider on what steps they are taking to manage the security of your IT infrastructure.  Your tech support services can follow the following steps to prevent proxy hacking. You should limit the connections from open proxy servers to your website. Open proxy servers are accessible to anyone online and are often used by cyber-criminals.

Is your network secure from a proxy hacking attack?

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365 iT SOLUTIONS can help protect your business from cyber-criminals and attacks like proxy hacking.  We can evaluate your current IT infrastructure security with our Complimentary Network and Security Audit and demonstrate why we are Toronto’s leading IT consulting firm offering industry leading Managed IT ServicesIT Support ServicesIT Outsourcing ServicesTech Support Services and Cloud Services.

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