Cyberattacks Target UK Labour Party | Avast

Cyberattacks Target UK Labour Party | Avast
Avast Security News Team, 15 November 2019

Plus, Google criticized for gathering health data, a research team uncovers 265 fake news sites, and Mexico oil giant Pemex gets hit with ransomware



An attack on the Labour Party’s website Monday succeeded in causing certain services to go offline. According to BBC News, the strike was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, a blitz of internet traffic produced by a botnet of hijacked systems that overwhelms a server with simultaneous requests. The DDoS attack followed a smaller attack that the site’s security staff was able to shut down. Labour Party leadership noted that the attacks came during the active campaigns of the 2019 general election. Some sources have claimed the attacks were generated by servers in Russia and Brazil, though the BBC was told the attacks are not linked to any specific state. 
Google under fire for plan to share millions of health records
Google has agreed to aggregate the personal contact information and complete health histories of millions of patients, which some federal officials and cybersecurity experts view as a possible breach of privacy. According to The Wall Street Journal, other experts maintain that “Project Nightingale,” as the program is called, complies with federal law. The plan is to work with the nonprofit Catholic healthcare group Ascension to collect patient data across 2,600 hospitals and medical facilities and then feed that information to an AI system that will analyze and categorize it in order to recommend better treatment plans. “Google has the power and funding to use AI and machine learning for good,” comm ..

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