Cyber Weekly Digest - Week #24

In this week's digest, we find out how one customer led to a major global internet outage and a cyber attack on EA games leading to valuable information being stolen. Keep reading to find out more.

1. EA confirms it has been breached with hackers stealing valuable information.

This week, Electronic Arts (EA), the major game publisher, suffered a cyber incident in which hackers were able to download the source codes for the Frostbite game engine used in popular games. It is believed that 780GB of data was stolen. However, no player data was accessed in the breach. Attackers are advertising the data for sale on various hacking forums, with screenshots as evidence.

2. US Department of Justice was able to recover most of the Colonial Pipeline ransom payment.

This week the US Department of Justice confirmed that it had recovered 63.7 Bitcoin of the 75 Bitcoin payment made by Colonial Pipeline to the Darkside ransomware group. In addition, law enforcement were able to seize a cryptocurrency wallet containing the ransom payment. They also had access to the private key allowing full access to the wallet and its funds.

3. Microsoft fixed six zero days in this month's Patch Tuesday.

This month's Microsoft Patch Tuesday fixed about half of the usual number of vulnerabilities. Although just 49 flaws were fixed, Microsoft has warned of six zero-day weaknesses that attackers are already exploiting. Interestingly, two of the Windows zero-day flaws — CVE-2021-31201 and CVE-2021-31199 — are related to a patch Adobe recently released for CVE-2021-28550, a flaw in Adobe Acrobat and Reader that also is being actively exploited.

4. JBS confirms it paid $11 million to the REvil ransomware gang following the recent attack.

JBS, the world's largest beef producer, recently suffered a ransomware attack, which shut down its production. JBS said they paid the $11 million ransom to prevent their stolen data from being leaked publicly and mitigate possible technical issues. Originally the ransom demand was $22.5 million; however, this was reduced to $11 million following negotiations.

5. Many of the worlds most popular websites were down in a major Fastly CDN outage.

On Tuesday, a significant internet blackout hit many high-profile websites, including Amazon, Reddit, and the New York Times. Fastly, the cloud-computing company responsible for the issues has stated that the outage resulted from a software bug triggered by one customer who had changed their settings.