X-Industry

More than 1,000 planned operations and over 3,000 outpatient appointments have been postponed amid ongoing disruption caused by a cyber-attack that impacted London hospitals.  Synnovis, an agency which manages labs for NHS trusts and GPs in south-east London, was the victim of a data hack on 3 June.[1]

New figures from NHS England show that since then, 3,396 appointments and 1,255 elective procedures have been postponed.  In a statement, the chief executives of two affected trusts said they were

French multinational Schneider Electric is reporting that its Sustainability Business division suffered from a ransomware attack earlier this month.  The company confirmed the incident in a statement this week that the attack affected its Resource Advisory product, a data visualization tool for sustainability information, as well as other “division specific systems.”

Schneider Electric said that data was accessed by the hackers.[1]  Bleeping Computer, which first reported the incident, said the

A US Pentagon official recently said he resigned his post because US cybersecurity is allegedly no match for China, calling it 'kindergarten level.'  This senior cybersecurity official Nicholas Chaillan said he quit because he thought it was impossible for the US to compete with China on artificial intelligence (AI). He joined the US Air Force as its first chief software officer in August 2018 and worked to equip this branch and the Pentagon with the most secure and advanced software available.

A new ransomware strain called PXJ ransomware (also known as XVFXGW ransomware) was first discovered in late February 2020.[1]  Half of the known samples were uploaded from Korea, and it uses a Korean website for a C2, showing predominantly Asian targeting.

Details

The earliest PXJ ransomware sample is from 24 February 2020.  It received its name for the .pxj extension that it adds to the files it encrypts.  Its alternative name, XVFXGW, refers to the strings in two contact emails (xvfxgw3929@pr