Technical issues disrupt UK mobile carriers. Remote work security. Money mules. HHS incident.

An outage, described as a "technical issue," not an attack, has disrupted voice service in four British mobile carriers--O2, Three, Vodafone and EE--inconveniencing many who were depending on service for remote work, the Telegraph reports. 

One consequence of the pandemic-driven spike in remote work is that many of the norms that inform behavioral anomaly detection may need re-evaluation and revision. Duo Security's Decipher blog points out that people will work at unusual times and unusual places. Or they may fumble VPN access or unfamiliar multifactor authentication to such an extent that multiple login attempts will no longer indicate that some form of credential-stuffing or brute-force attack is in progress.

Another consequence of economic hardship occurring in tandem with telecommuting is an increase in the number of people being recruited as money-mules, KrebsOnSecurity reports. One of the larger operations Krebs describes, the "Vasty Health Care Foundation," strikes a high-minded tone about connecting causes with providers, tells prospective mules they're "hired," assigns busy work, and then has them "process donations"--that is, launder money.

The consensus about the incident the US Department of Health and Human Services experienced Sunday and Monday is now relatively firm: it probably wasn't an attack at all, and clearly the Department's operations didn't suffer. Some think that it might not even have amounted to a probe or a preliminary distributed denial-of-service attack. It might have been an unusually large number of visitors looking for reliable information on COVID-19, or even an artifact of the Department's Drupal instance.