600 Law Enforcement Raid Former NATO Bunker
Massive Data Bunker called "Cyberbunker 2.0" Used by Dark Web Gang
Germany shuts down illegal data center in former NATO bunker
600 German investigators said Friday they have shut down a data processing center installed in a former NATO bunker that hosted sites dealing in drugs and other illegal activities. Seven people were arrested.

The main suspect a 59-year-old Dutchman acquired the former military bunker in western Germany, in 2013. He then turned it into a very large and heavily secured data processing center "in order to make it available to clients, according to our investigations, exclusively for illegal purposes," Bauer added. Authorities believe he had "links to organized crime."

The data center was set up as what investigators described as a "bulletproof hosting," meant to conceal illicit activities from authorities' eyes. A report by German news site, DW, claims the facility covers 5,000m2,
and spans five floors underground, and is protected by fencing and surveillance cameras. 200 servers have been secured so far as a result of the raid, along with paper documents, mobile phones and large quantities of cash. Kunz described the size of the haul as "gigantic". He added: "This will keep us busy for several months or years."

Authorities allege that the bunker slash data center was used to host the Cannabis Road drug marketplace, "drugs, hacking tools and financial-theft wares" emporium Wall Street Market, and myriad other criminal activities like synthetic drug ring Orange Chemicals. Investigators believe the servers in the bunker were used to launch a 2016 cyber attack on Deutsche Telekom reported to have taken out at least 1 million routers belonging to the company's customers. Charges leveled at suspects, as of yet unnamed, also include counterfeiting and child pornography. gizmodo.com computerweekly.com apnews.com

Editor's note: We aren't fighting kids living in their parents basements anymore, folks. These are well financed and entrenched in local markets - organized crime gangs. And the only reason we ran this was to show the extent these gangs will go to with their efforts against the West. So these articles are meant to over exaggerate dark web bad actors or DOJ convictions. As they truly exist and the FBI pick up's around the world of these gang leaders once outside of their protected home country's are real and dangerous take downs. And this article is merely an example of how serious the Dark web threat truly is. -Gus Downing

Prepare for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month
October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM), which is a collaborative effort between the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and its public and private partners-including the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA)-to ensure every American has the resources they need to stay safe and secure online while increasing the resilience of the Nation against cyber threats. This year's theme, "Own IT. Secure IT. Protect IT.," focuses on promoting personal accountability and positive behavior when it comes to cybersecurity.

CISA encourages organizations to see the NCSAM 2019 webpage and the NCSAM 2019 Toolkit for ways to participate in and promote NCSAM. us-cert.gov

Cybersecurity Breaches to Increase Nearly 70% Over the Next 5 years
The new research, The Future of Cybercrime & Security: Threat Analysis, Impact Assessment & Mitigation Strategies 2019-2024 noted that while the cost per breach will steadily rise in the future, the levels of data disclosed will make headlines but not impact breach costs directly, as most fines and lost business are not directly related to breach sizes.

The Human Element Remains Key, Despite AI Advances

Cybercrime is increasingly sophisticated; the report anticipates that cybercriminals will use AI that will learn the behavior of security systems in a similar way to how cybersecurity firms currently employ the technology to detect abnormal behavior. The research also highlights that the evolution of deep fakes and other AI-based techniques is also likely to play a part in social media cybercrime in the future. securitymagazine.com

Compliance Costs for California Privacy Law Pegged at $55 Billion
Costing Employers From $50k to $2M to Comply
California's government said that preparing for its sweeping privacy law, effective in January, is expected to cost businesses about $55 billion, with smaller companies likely having a harder time complying than larger ones.

Businesses with fewer than 20 employees are expected to spend about $50,000 on average to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act, while larger companies that collect and share a lot of consumer data might spend more than $2 million to comply.

The law gives California residents the right to know what data companies collect about them and to opt out of having their data shared or sold. It applies to businesses that have annual revenue of at least $25 million as well as companies that buy, sell or share personal data on at least 50,000 consumers or generate at least half of their revenue from selling personal information

The CCPA is considered the strictest consumer-privacy law in the U.S. Other states, including Washington and New Jersey, have weighed similar regulations in recent months. That is prompting businesses to push for a national law that would pre-empt a patchwork of state laws. cybersecurity.cmail20.com

Targeted Cybercrime on a Tear
Big Game Hunting on the Rise
New data published today from CrowdStrike's OverWatch threat-hunting service team shows that targeted cybercrime made up 61% of the targeted attacks CrowdStrike saw between January and June of 2019, a major spike from 2018, when it made up just 25% for the year. Nation-state attacks comprised 39% of the targeted attack campaigns in the first half of this year, versus 75% for all of last year.

We saw an uptick in the second half of last year [with targeted cybercrime] as big game hunting was on the rise. And this year so far has lent itself to a major uptick," says Jennifer Ayers, senior director of OverWatch and security response at CrowdStrike. There were more targeted cybercrime attack campaigns in the first half of the year, and "an increase in hands-on keyboard activity," she says, as they burrowed through their victims' networks.

Part of the reason for the surge in targeted cybercrime was the well-documented rise in ransomware attacks going after commercial businesses and organizations in order to net bigger ransom fees, aka "big-game hunting."

Overall, organizations report a surge in cyberattacks. A new global survey of CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs, by CrowdStrike rival Carbon Black shows that 84% of organizations have seen an increase in cyberattacks overall in the past 12 months, with 88% saying they suffered a data breach in that period. More than 80% report that attacks have gotten more advanced.

Nearly 45% suffered some financial damage from their breach, and 12% described the damage as "severe."

"Telecommunications is the new financial services" when it comes to being a big target, Ayers notes. "They are being hit really hard by multiple actors, but very interestingly, those actors all have different objectives." darkreading.com

One of the World's Biggest Manufacturers of Hearing Aids
Crippled by Ransomware Attack
After a month, hearing aid manufacturer Demant has yet to recover after the attack.

Demant, one of the world's largest manufacturers of hearing aids, expects to incur losses of up to $95 million following what appears to be a ransomware infection that hit the company at the start of the month. Per its own statements, all the company's infrastructure was impacted -- and impacted severely.

This marks one of the most significant losses caused by a cyber-security incident outside of the NotPetya ransomware outbreak -- known to have incurred companies like shipping giant Maersk and courier service FedEx losses of over $300 million, each.

These business upheavals have been a disaster for the company's bottom line. In a message to its investors, Demant said it expects to lose somewhere between $80 million and $95 million. zdnet.com

Getting from AI Pilot to Scale
So you've succeeded with your automation and AI pilot project. Now how do you get to scale?

The days of planning and implementing those first AI and automation pilots are pretty much over at many organizations. But while enterprises may have figured out the pilot phase of these technologies, they haven't achieved the game-changing benefits yet because putting automation and AI into practice across the entire organization is still a challenge.

How do you make the new technology work with your ERP systems and your other processes? How do you integrate automation and AI with your existing IT infrastructure? The struggle is real.

A new survey from consulting firm PwC found that only 23% of business leaders are using both big ERP and small automation sprints in their automation strategy. That's a missed opportunity, according to PwC. The benefits of automation and AI come from automation of core platforms like those already running in enterprises. PwC says that spreading automation in this way to enable standardization and control boosts efficiency.

Krishnamurthy argues that scaling the technology is the most important part of the process, because it's where the organization starts to realize the benefits. PwC estimates that organizations can achieve productivity boosts of 30% to 40% from scaling this technology.

Krishnamurthy offered a few recommendations to enterprises embarking on scaling automation and AI. First, line up "a strong change agenda" In order to close the divide between "the innovation curve" and "the adoption curve." You also have to assess the entire organization to see how your employees say they work.

Reframe the conversation to ask how work will be done in the context of how you deliver your value as an organization, Krishnamurthy said.

"Do not be bound by a project mindset," he said. "Be bound by an outcome mindset."

Finally, he said, focus on thinking about decision automation versus task-level automation. informationweek.com

Senior Manager/Director Detection & Response Security Operations posted in Bellevue, WA., for Salesforce

Companies vastly overestimating their GDPR readiness, only 28% achieving compliance