Top 5 cyber news of the week


Law enforcement has scored a victory this week by dismantling the Hive ransomware gang. Meanwhile, Riot Games confirmed ransomware after the source code of its popular game leaked online.

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Here's this week's recap – a brief summary of leaks, hacks, and threats Cybernews observed between January 23 – January 27.

1. Riot Games, the developer of League of Legends, admitted falling victim to a ransomware attack. The gang behind the attack reportedly asked for a $10 million ransom. Merely hours after the company said it wouldn’t pay, a threat actor put League of Legends source code up for sale at a starting price of $1 million.

2. The source code of the so-called Russian Google – Yandex – was leaked this week. Someone posted over 44GB of data on a popular hacking forum. A researcher who had investigated the data said the archive contains the content of a repository without any additional data. All files are dated to February 24, 2022, the day on which Russian forces invaded Ukraine.

3. The FBI’s so-called ‘no-fly’ list surfaced on the web. A Swiss hacker has found a redacted version of the anti-terrorism ‘no-fly’ list – a database of personal information of identified or suspected terrorists. Days after the news broke, a threat actor listed a dataset for sale that allegedly is the recently leaked ‘no-fly’ list with over 1.5 million entries with full names and birth dates of individuals denied boarding an aircraft and around 250,000 entries of selectees who must undergo additional security screening before flying.

4. Law enforcement has dismantled the international ransomware syndicate Hive – its website and Application Programming Interface (API) were dismantled by the US authorities. Hive ransomware has victimized hundreds of businesses since the start of its operations in June 2021. Hive rocked the ransomware market from the very beginning, hacking Europe’s largest consumer electronics retailer MediaMarkt and demanding a whopping $240m ransom payment.

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5. This has been yet another ‘leaky’ week. We broke news about Puma investigating a potential data leak, a prestigious French rugby club leaking its source code, and a popular Android role-playing game that exposed gamers who risked losing their game progress due to a security flaw.


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