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Critical Cosmos Database Flaw Affected Thousands of Microsoft Azure Customers
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https://thehackernews.com/2021/08/critical-cosmos-database-flaw-affected.html
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Cloud infrastructure security company Wiz on Thursday revealed details of a now-fixed Azure Cosmos database vulnerability that could have been potentially exploited to grant any Azure user full admin access to other customers' database instances without any authorization.
The flaw, which grants read, write, and delete privileges, has been dubbed "ChaosDB," with Wiz researchers noting that "the vulnerability has a trivial exploit that doesn't require any previous access to the target environment, and impacts thousands of organizations, including numerous Fortune 500 companies."
Cosmos DB is Microsoft's proprietary NoSQL database that's advertised as "a fully managed service" that "takes database administration off your hands with automatic management, updates and patching."
The Wiz Research Team reported the issue to Microsoft on August 12, after which the Windows maker took steps to mitigate the issue within 48 hours of responsible disclosure, in addition to awarding a $40,000 bounty to the finders on August 17.
"We have no indication that external entities outside the researcher had access to the primary read-write key associated with your Azure Cosmos DB account(s)," Microsoft said in a statement. "In addition, we are not aware of any data access because of this vulnerability. Azure Cosmos DB accounts with a vNET or firewall enabled are protected by additional security mechanisms that prevent risk of unauthorized access."
The exploit identified by Wiz concerns a chain of vulnerabilities in the Jupyter Notebook feature of Cosmos DB, enabling an adversary to obtain the credentials corresponding to the target Cosmos DB account, including the Primary Key, which provides access to the administrative resources for the database account.
"Using these credentials, it is possible to view, modify, and delete data in the target Cosmos DB account via multiple channels," the researchers said. As a consequence, any Cosmos DB asset that has the Jupyter Notebook feature enabled is potentially impacted.
Although Microsoft notified over 30% of Cosmos DB customers about the potential security breach, Wiz expects the actual number to be much higher, given that the vulnerability has been exploitable for months.
"Every Cosmos DB customer should assume they've been exposed," Wiz researchers noted, adding, "we also recommend reviewing all past activity in your Cosmos DB account." Additionally, Microsoft is also urging its customers to regenerate their Cosmos DB Primary Keys to mitigate any risk arising from the flaw.
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Data_Breaches
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Researchers Detail Modus Operandi of ShinyHunters Cyber Crime Group
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https://thehackernews.com/2021/08/researchers-detail-modus-operandi-of.html
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ShinyHunters, a notorious cybercriminal underground group that's been on a data breach spree since last year, has been observed searching companies' GitHub repository source code for vulnerabilities that can be abused to stage larger scale attacks, an analysis of the hackers' modus operandi has revealed.
"Primarily operating on Raid Forums, the collective's moniker and motivation can partly be derived from their avatar on social media and other forums: a shiny Umbreon Pokémon," Intel 471 researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "As Pokémon players hunt and collect "shiny" characters in the game, ShinyHunters collects and resells user data."
The revelation comes as the average cost of a data breach rose from $3.86 million to $4.24 million, making it the highest average cost in 17 years, with compromised credentials responsible for 20% of the breaches reported by over 500 organizations.
Since rising to prominence in April 2020, ShinyHunters has claimed responsibility for a string of data breaches, including Tokopedia, Wattpad, Pixlr, Bonobos, BigBasket, Mathway, Unacademy, MeetMindful, and Microsoft's GitHub account, among others.
An assessment by Risk Based Security found that the threat actor has exposed a total of more than 1.12 million unique email addresses belonging to S&P 100 organizations, education, government and military entities as of late 2020.
Last week, the group began selling a database purportedly containing the personal information of 70 million AT&T customers for a starting price of $200,000, although the U.S. telecom provider has denied suffering a breach of its systems.
ShinyHunters has a checkered history of compromising websites and developer repositories to steal credentials or API keys to a company's cloud services, which are subsequently abused to gain access to databases and gather sensitive information to be resold for profit or published for free on hacker forums.
The adversary has also been observed targeting DevOps personnel or GitHub repositories in order to steal valid OAuth tokens, leveraging them to breach cloud infrastructure and bypass any two-factor authentication mechanisms.
"ShinyHunters may not have as much notoriety as the ransomware groups that are currently causing havoc for enterprises all over the world. However, tracking actors like this are crucial to preventing your enterprise from being hit with such an attack," the researchers said.
"The information ShinyHunters gathers is often turned around and sold on the same underground marketplaces where ransomware actors use it to launch their own attacks. If enterprises can move to detect activity like ShinyHunters, they in turn can stop ransomware attacks before they are ever launched."
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Data_Breaches
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Chinese Hackers Believed to be Behind Second Cyberattack on Air India
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https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/chinese-hackers-believed-to-be-behind.html
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Even as a massive data breach affecting Air India came to light the previous month, India's flag carrier airline appears to have suffered a separate cyber assault that lasted for a period of at least two months and 26 days, new research has revealed, which attributed the incident with moderate confidence to a Chinese nation-state threat actor called APT41.
Group-IB dubbed the campaign "ColunmTK" based on the names of command-and-control (C2) server domains that were used for facilitating communications with the compromised systems.
"The potential ramifications of this incident for the entire airline industry and carriers that might yet discover traces of ColunmTK in their networks are significant," the Singapore-headquartered threat hunting company said.
While Group-IB alluded that this may have been a supply chain attack targeting SITA, the Swiss aviation information technology company told The Hacker News that they are two different security incidents.
"The airline confirmed vis-à-vis SITA on June 11, 2021 that the cyber attack on Air India [...] is not the same or in any way linked to the attack on SITA PSS," SITA told our publication over email.
Also known by other monikers such as Winnti Umbrella, Axiom and Barium, APT41 is a prolific Chinese-speaking nation-state advanced persistent threat known for its campaigns centered around information theft and espionage against healthcare, high-tech, and telecommunications sectors to establish and maintain strategic access for stealing intellectual property and committing financially motivated cybercrimes.
"Their cyber crime intrusions are most apparent among video game industry targeting, including the manipulation of virtual currencies, and attempted deployment of ransomware," according to FireEye. "APT41 operations against higher education, travel services, and news/media firms provide some indication that the group also tracks individuals and conducts surveillance."
On May 21, Air India disclosed a data breach affecting 4.5 million of its customers over a period stretching nearly 10 years in the wake of a supply chain attack directed at its Passenger Service System (PSS) provider SITA earlier this February.
The breach involved personal data registered between Aug. 26, 2011, and Feb. 3, 2021, including details such as names, dates of birth, contact information, passport information, ticket information, Star Alliance, and Air India frequent flyer data, as well as credit card data.
FireEye's Mandiant, which is assisting SITA with the incident response efforts, has since determined that the attack was highly sophisticated and that the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and compromise indicators point to a single entity, adding the "identity and motive of the perpetrator are not entirely conclusive."
Likely a New Attack Against Air India
Group-IB's analysis has now revealed that at least since Feb. 23, an infected device inside Air India's network (named "SITASERVER4") communicated with a server hosting Cobalt Strike payloads dating all the way back to Dec. 11, 2020.
Following this initial compromise, the attackers are said to have established persistence and obtained passwords in order to pivot laterally to the broader network with the goal of gathering information inside the local network.
No fewer than 20 devices were infected during the course of lateral movement, the company said. "The attackers exfiltrated NTLM hashes and plain-text passwords from local workstations using hashdump and mimikatz," Group-IB Threat Intelligence Analyst, Nikita Rostovcev, said. "The attackers tried to escalate local privileges with the help of BadPotato malware."
In all, the adversary extracted 23.33 MB of data from five devices named SITASERVER4, AILCCUALHSV001, AILDELCCPOSCE01, AILDELCCPDB01, and WEBSERVER3, with the attackers taking 24 hours and 5 minutes to spread Cobalt Strike beacons to other devices in the airline's network. The initial entry point for the attack remains unknown as yet.
Connections to Barium are grounded on the basis of overlaps between the C2 servers found in the attack infrastructure with those used in earlier attacks and tactics employed by the threat actor to park their domains once their operations are over. Group-IB also said it discovered a file named "Install.bat" that bore similarities to payloads deployed in a 2020 global intrusion campaign.
When reached for a response, Group-IB CTO Dmitry Volkov told The Hacker News that "Despite the fact that the initial compromise vector remains unknown, Group-IB treats [the] SITA incident and Air India breach as interrelated."
"This assumption is built on the fact that it was a server in Air India's network that, Group-IB assumes, might have established [a] connection with SITA's network that was breached first. According to Group-IB's data, SITASERVER4 was the first host to have been infected within Air India's network. This has also been confirmed by Air India," Volkov added.
However, it's worth noting that SITASERVER4 was neither owned or managed by SITA. Speaking on background, SITA noted that the server in question had been previously used to host software offered by the company to Air India and that the specific software was removed from the server in 2019.
The aviation IT provider also clarified that none of the methods that were used to target Air India since February 23 were put to use in the attacks on SITA PSS, adding the adversary was removed from its network weeks prior to the start of the malicious activity directed against the airline, implying that the two incidents had no bearing on one another.
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Data_Breaches
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Using Breached Password Detection Services to Prevent Cyberattack
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https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/using-breached-password-detection.html
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Bolstering password policies in your organization is an important part of a robust cybersecurity strategy. Cybercriminals are using compromised accounts as one of their favorite tactics to infiltrate business-critical environments; as we've seen in recent news, these attacks can be dangerous and financially impactful.
Unfortunately, account compromise is a very successful attack method and requires much less effort than other attack vectors.
One of the essential types of password protection recommended by noted cybersecurity standards is breached password detection. Hackers often use known breached password lists in credential stuffing or password spraying attacks.
Here are some critical criteria to consider when your sysadmins are evaluating breached password protection solutions.
Breached password recommendations
In the last few years, password security recommendations have evolved past the traditional recommendations regarding password security.
Businesses have used Microsoft Active Directory for years to implement password policies in the organization. Standard Active Directory password policies include minimal password configuration settings.
Below is an example of the settings offered with a conventional Active Directory Password Policy:
Enforce password history
Maximum password age
Minimum password age
Minimum password length
Minimum password length audit
Password must meet complexity requirements
Store password using reversible encryption
By default, Active Directory Password Policies do not include a solution to implement breached password protection.
Active Directory Password Policy settings
Why is it important for businesses to start thinking about breached password protection? Let's look at best practice recommendations from leading authorities in cybersecurity guidance.
New password policy recommendations
As mentioned, traditional password policies created using Active Directory are limited in features and capabilities. These allow creating basic password policies with standard length, complexity, age, and other requirements. However, there is no way to use native functionality to implement breached password protection.
While there is a means for implementing a password filter .dll in Active Directory to provision password dictionary protection, this is a manual process relying on the development of custom password filter .dll files.
New password policy guidance from leading cybersecurity authorities such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommend breached password protection. The NIST Special Publication 800-63B SP 800-63B Section 5.1.1.2 paragraph 9 states:
"Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator."
Basically, NIST's guidance recommends that organizations should force a password change if there is evidence of a breach. For businesses to have proof of a password breach, they must have a way to monitor the password landscape for breached passwords. In addition to monitoring for passwords to become breached, as users choose new passwords, the new password choices need to be checked.
Evaluating breached password detection services
Breached password detection is a recommended best practice for an additional layer of cyberattack prevention. Consider the following functions as must-haves to pay close attention to when choosing a solution:
Ease of deployment
Proactive monitoring
Proactive password changes
Breached password database size
Integration with current Active Directory password policies
Ease of deployment
An essential consideration businesses need to make when choosing a third-party breached password solution is deployment ease. Look for solutions that are easily deployed using existing Active Directory infrastructure. Solutions that are difficult to deploy will likely lead to configuration issues and challenges with implementation and time to value. Look for solutions that make use of existing Active Directory infrastructure along with Group Policy that allows quickly making use of existing policies and infrastructure.
1 — Proactive monitoring
One of the essential requirements for breached password protection is proactive monitoring. Organizations need a solution that checks a password during the password set operation and proactively monitors the password landscape to find passwords that may become breached. This functionality helps to ensure passwords that may not be breached during creation, but become breached later, are correctly identified and can be remediated.
2 — Proactive password changes
Dovetailing into the proactive monitoring of breached passwords in the environment, organizations need to look for a breached password protection solution that proactively requires end-users to change their password if these become breached. This feature helps ensure any passwords that become breached in the environment are remediated as quickly as possible.
3 — Breached password database size
Keep in mind that all breached password protection services are not equal in the number of breached passwords checked. Breached password databases may vary between different services. The more extensive the breached password database, the better for protecting against breached passwords. If the quantity of breached passwords isn't transparently communicated, ask the vendor directly how many are included in their backend lists.
4 — Integration with current Active Directory password policies
Specops Breached Password Protection
Look for a breached password protection solution that can integrate with current Active Directory password policies. It means you can leave GPO assignments in place that assign various password policies to specific users and will help to prevent "reinventing the wheel."
Specops Breached Password Protection
The Specops Password Policy solution allows organizations to have powerful breached password protection as part of the environment's password security. Features include all the top requirements, like:
Proactive breached password monitoring and password change enforcement
Easily to deploy and integrates with existing Active Directory GPO-based password policies
Downloadable breached password database or API-based protection
Managed database of over 2-billion passwords and growing
With the API-based approach, you get real-time breached password protection for your organization's passwords
Using Specops Password Policy with Breached Password Protection, you can easily rollout breached password protection using GPO-based Active Directory Password Policies that are already in place.
To delve into the Specops Password Policy with Breached Password Protection, start a free trial anytime.
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Data_Breaches
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Can Data Protection Systems Prevent Data At Rest Leakage?
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https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/can-data-protection-systems-prevent.html
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Protection against insider risks works when the process involves controlling the data transfer channels or examining data sources.
One approach involves preventing USB flash drives from being copied or sending them over email. The second one concerns preventing leakage or fraud in which an insider accesses files or databases with harmful intentions.
What's the best way to protect your data?
It seems obvious that prevention is the best way to solve any problem. In most cases, DCAP (data-centric audit and protection) and DAM (database activity monitoring) is sufficient. Both serve the purpose of protecting data at rest.
The following example illustrates the approach we found in the Russian legal system.
An employee of the Federal Migration Service in one of the Russian regions was approached by his friend, who asked him to hide information about two offenses in his file in the migrant database. The employee knew that this could be done remotely, accessed the database from home, and blocked the necessary data. For doing this, he received a reward of a mere $100.
In order to prevent this incident from happening, it was enough for the manager to observe the employee accessing the database and performing unauthorized operations. A DAM solution would be helpful. Here you can browse more information about the DAM system tactics.
As an example of how the DCAP system detected fraud, here is a customer's case from SearchInform:
SearchInform FileAuditor identified several computers on which price lists were stored and where, in addition to selling prices, purchase prices were also listed. This information is confidential; it is prohibited to distribute it uncontrollably within or outside the company. If customers know the purchase prices, they will be armed with arguments and can negotiate the best discounts. There is clearly a loss for the seller.
The price column was typed in white, which made the price list appear like it was normal. In spite of this, FileAuditor acknowledged that the purchase price was definitely included in the document. Investigating the case using the DLP system, the cybersecurity specialist discovered that employees had forwarded these price lists to external email addresses. A subsequent investigation confirmed that there was collusion between the buyers and sellers.
This was classic scheming: the seller's manager agreed to a large discount for the buyer on any pretext he could think of. The buyer representative agreed to repay a portion of the difference to the seller's manager, who negotiated the discount.
So, both the seller and manager benefited, while the company selling lost money. In the event of a violation, it can take up to a year for the damage to be identified; depending on the size of the business, this damage can range from thousands up to millions of dollars.
It turns out that control of information sources enables an information security expert to detect an incident at its earliest stage - intention, rather than following up after it occurs. Tight control on such matters prohibits a more detailed investigation, which would allow evidence to be collected and conclusions drawn so that the incident wouldn't repeat itself. Here, the information security specialist has tightened DLP security policies on documents that include purchase prices.
Which is the best approach to data protection?
A complex approach. It's not possible to solve everything with DLP. Not everything is really dependent on control of the source. However, when combined, these approaches give a super-effect. When the DCAP system detects a potential violation, the DLP system gathers evidence and allows conclusions to be drawn on how to improve business processes and make them more transparent.
What are DCAP and DAM?
DCAP and DAM solutions are already on the market in mass quantities due to the need for data at rest protection. In addition, this software is easy to use and integrates with already popular security solutions.
You can use SearchInform FileAuditor to determine:
which documents contain business-critical information,
how much of this information is stored by the company and where it is located,
who has access to them and can modify them.
It is possible for the IT department to take on such tasks. For instance, DCAP makes the file system less messy since each document is assigned a category (contracts, prices, personal data, research, etc.).
Probably not the most important feature, but shadow copying is a useful feature, which lets you restore documents without any problems if something goes wrong. As a first step, however, the software is intended for information security specialists.
Here's how FileAuditor works:
searches for a file
assesses its compliance with the rules and labels it ("personal data," "agreement," etc.)
if necessary, copy a file to the repository.
keeps track of all actions with files and folders
reads permissions on files and folders
at subsequent checks, only newly added or changed files are scanned.
This year, SearchInform also released its own database monitoring solution - SearchInform Database Monitor. A database is the main information asset of businesses, so it plays a critical role in their operations. Fraudsters are interested in both the entire array and specific access points to data. This threat can be handled using the DAM system; for example, the Database Monitor sees:
Who is accessing the databases, and for what purpose?
What information is requested from the database, and how much of it.
What changes are being made to the databases?
In spite of the belief by many companies that they have sufficient control over their file systems and are certain that their users will adhere to corporate policies, our experience shows that some companies can treat sensitive information poorly, and some documents can be found at nonconforming locations.
Try the file audit solution for 30 days for free, and you'll probably change your mind and learn more about data misuse incidents within your company.
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Data_Breaches
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Passwordstate Warns of Ongoing Phishing Attacks Following Data Breach
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https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/passwordstate-warns-of-ongoing-phishing.html
|
Click Studios, the Australian software firm which confirmed a supply chain attack affecting its Passwordstate password management application, has warned customers of an ongoing phishing attack by an unknown threat actor.
"We have been advised a bad actor has commenced a phishing attack with a small number of customers having received emails requesting urgent action," the company said in an updated advisory released on Wednesday. "These emails are not sent by Click Studios."
Last week, Click Studios said attackers had employed sophisticated techniques to compromise Passwordstate's update mechanism, using it to drop malware on user computers. Only customers who performed In-Place Upgrades between April 20, 8:33 PM UTC, and April 22, 0:30 AM UTC are said to be affected.
While Passwordstate serves about 29,000 customers, the Adelaide-based firm maintained that the total number of impacted customers is very low. It's also urging users to refrain from posting correspondence from the company on social media, stating the actor behind the breach is actively monitoring such platforms for information pertaining to the attack in order to exploit it to their advantage for carrying out related intrusions.
The original attack was carried out via a trojanized Passwordstate update file containing a modified DLL ("moserware.secretsplitter.dll") that, in turn, extracted retrieved a second-stage payload from a remote server so as to extract sensitive information from compromised systems. As a countermeasure, Click Studios released a hotfix package named "Moserware.zip'' to help customers remove the tampered DLL and advised affected users to reset all passwords stored in the password manager.
The newly spotted phishing attack involves crafting seemingly legitimate email messages that "replicate Click Studios email content" — based on the emails that were shared by customers on social media — to push a new variant of the malware.
"The phishing attack is requesting customers to download a modified hotfix Moserware.zip file, from a CDN Network not controlled by Click Studios, that now appears to have been taken down," the company said. "Initial analysis indicates this has a newly modified version of the malformed Moserware.SecretSplitter.dll, that on loading then attempts to use an alternate site to obtain the payload file."
The Passwordstate hack is the latest high-profile supply-chain attack to come to light in recent months, highlighting how sophisticated threat groups are targeting software built by third parties as a stepping-stone to break into sensitive government and corporate computer networks.
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Data_Breaches
|
3.2 Billion Leaked Passwords Contain 1.5 Million Records with Government Emails
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https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/32-billion-leaked-passwords-contain-15.html
|
A staggering number of 3.28 billion passwords linked to 2.18 billion unique email addresses were exposed in what's one of the largest data dumps of breached usernames and passwords.
In addition, the leak includes 1,502,909 passwords associated with email addresses from government domains across the world, with the U.S. government alone taking up 625,505 of the exposed passwords, followed by the U.K (205,099), Australia (136,025), Brazil (68,535), and Canada (50,726).
The findings come from an analysis of a massive 100GB data set called "COMB21" — aka Compilation of Many Breaches — that was published for free in an online cybercrime forum earlier this February by putting together data from multiple leaks in different companies and organizations that occurred over the years.
It's worth noting that a leak doesn't imply a breach of public administration systems. The passwords are said to have been obtained via techniques such as password hash cracking after being stolen or through phishing attacks and eavesdropping on insecure, plaintext connections.
The top 10 U.S. government domains affected by the leak are as follows:
State Department - state.gov (29,144)
Veterans Affairs Department - va.gov (28,937)
Department of Homeland Security - dhs.gov (21,575)
National Aeronautics and Space Administration - nasa.gov (15,665)
Internal Revenue Service - irs.gov (10,480)
Center for Disease Control and Prevention - cdc.gov (8,904)
Department of Justice - usdoj.gov (8,857)
Social Security Administration - ssa.gov (8,747)
U.S. Postal Service - usps.gov (8,205), and
Environmental Protection Agency - epa.gov (7,986)
Interestingly, this leak also includes 13 credentials linked to emails of the Oldsmar water plant in Florida, as previously reported by CyberNews. However, there's no evidence that the breached passwords were used to carry out the cyberattack in February. In contrast, only 18,282 passwords related to Chinese government domains and 1,964 passwords from those related to Russia were laid bare.
"It is an indication that the passwords in these countries, made up of local alphabets, are less targeted by hackers. It is an unexpected layer of protection in relation to the Roman alphabet," said Syhunt Founder and Chief Visionary Officer (CVO) Felipe Daragon.
On a related note, a notorious threat actor named ShinyHunters has posted an alleged database consisting of 20 million BigBasket users for free, almost five months after the Indian online grocery delivery startup confirmed a data breach. According to Under the Breach's Alon Gal, the database includes users' email addresses, phone numbers, residential addresses, hashed passwords, dates of birth, and order histories.
In the past, ShinyHunters has been connected to the sale of personal data from several companies, including Zoosk, SocialShare, Tokopedia, TeeSpring, Mindful, Minted, Chatbooks, Dave, Promo, Mathway, Wattpad, MeetMindful.com, and StarTribune.
Users who have had their information exposed are strongly advised to change their existing passwords.
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Data_Breaches
|
Indian Brokerage Firm Upstox Suffers Data Breach Leaking 2.5 Millions Users' Data
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https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/indian-brokerage-firm-upstox-suffers.html
|
Online trading and discount brokerage platform Upstox has become the latest Indian company to suffer a security breach of its systems, resulting in the exposure of sensitive information of approximately 2.5 million users on the dark web.
The leaked information includes names, email addresses, dates of birth, bank account information, and about 56 million know your customer (KYC) documents pulled from the company's server.
The breach was first disclosed by independent researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia on April 11. It's not immediately clear when the incident occurred.
Reacting to the development, the company however said it had recently upgraded its security systems following reports of "unauthorized access into our database" while stressing that users' funds and securities remained protected.
As a precaution, besides initiating a secure password reset of users' accounts, Upstox said it restricted access to the impacted database, implying it was a case of a misconfigured AWS server. In addition, the company said it's incorporating multiple security enhancements at its third-party data warehouses and ring-fencing the network. Upstox refrained from specifying the exact number of client accounts that may have been exposed.
News of Upstox's security breach comes weeks after an India-based digital wallet service MobiKwik dealt with a major security incident after 8.2 terabytes (TB) of data belonging to millions of its users began circulating on cybercrime forums.
Other Indian companies such as BigBasket, Dunzo, Edureka, Paytm Mall, and Byju's-owned WhiteHat Jr too have reported data breaches in recent months.
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Data_Breaches
|
PHP Site's User Database Was Hacked In Recent Source Code Backdoor Attack
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https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/php-sites-user-database-was-hacked-in.html
|
The maintainers of the PHP programming language have issued an update regarding the security incident that came to light late last month, stating that the actors may have gotten hold of a user database containing their passwords to make unauthorized changes to the repository.
"We no longer believe the git.php.net server has been compromised. However, it is possible that the master.php.net user database leaked," Nikita Popov said in a message posted on its mailing list on April 6.
On March 28, unidentified actors used the names of Rasmus Lerdorf and Popov to push malicious commits to the "php-src" repository hosted on the git.php.net server that involved adding a backdoor to the PHP source code in an instance of a software supply chain attack.
While this was initially treated as a compromise of the git.php.net server, further investigation into the incident has revealed that the commits were a result of pushing them using HTTPS and password-based authentication, leading them to suspect a possible leak of the master.php.net user database.
The "git.php.net (intentionally) support[s] pushing changes not only via SSH (using the Gitolite infrastructure and public key cryptography), but also via HTTPS," Popov said. "The latter did not use Gitolite, and instead used git-http-backend behind Apache 2 Digest authentication against the master.php.net user database."
"It is notable that the attacker only makes a few guesses at usernames, and successfully authenticates once the correct username has been found. While we don't have any specific evidence for this, a possible explanation is that the user database of master.php.net has been leaked, although it is unclear why the attacker would need to guess usernames in that case."
Additionally, the master.php.net authentication system is said to be on a very old operating system and a version of PHP, raising the possibility that the attackers may have also exploited a vulnerability in the software to stage the attack.
As a consequence, the maintainers have migrated master.php.net to a new main.php.net system with support for TLS 1.2, in addition to resetting all existing passwords and storing passwords using bcrypt instead of a plain MD5 hash.
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Data_Breaches
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533 Million Facebook Users' Phone Numbers and Personal Data Leaked Online
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https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/533-million-facebook-users-phone.html
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In what's likely to be a goldmine for bad actors, personal information associated with approximately 533 million Facebook users worldwide has been leaked on a popular cybercrime forum for free—which was harvested by hackers in 2019 using a Facebook vulnerability.
The leaked data includes full names, Facebook IDs, mobile numbers, locations, email addresses, gender, occupation, city, country, marital status broken, account creation date, and other profile details broken down by country, with over 32 million records belonging to users in the U.S., 11 million users the U.K., and six million users in India, among others.
Also included in the leak are phone numbers from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and co-founders Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz, who are the fourth, fifth, and sixth members to have registered on Facebook.
Interestingly, it appears that the same phone number is also registered to his name on the privacy-focussed messaging app Signal. "Mark Zuckerberg also respects his own privacy, by using a chat app that has end-to-end encryption and isn't owned by @facebook," tweeted Synack Red Team researcher Dave Walker.
In total, the data being offered includes user information from 106 countries. Additionally, the data seems to have been obtained by exploiting a vulnerability that enabled automated scripts to scrape Facebook users' public profiles and associated private phone numbers en masse. The flaw has since been fixed by Facebook.
"This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. We found and fixed this issue in August 2019," said Liz Bourgeois, Facebook's director of strategic response communications, in a Saturday tweet.
Old data or not, the fact that the data appears to have been obtained by scraping Facebook profiles further complicates the company's equation with privacy, even as it has emerged relatively unscathed in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, in which the British consulting firm amassed of the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent for purposes of political advertising.
While this data dump appears to have sold in cybercrime communities at least since last year, a Telegram bot that appeared on the scene earlier this January allowed users to look up a phone number and receive the corresponding user's Facebook ID, or vice versa for a fee.
But with the data now available publicly for free, it's likely that the leak will allow malicious adversaries to exploit information for social engineering, marketing scams, and other cybercrimes. Users who have shared their phone numbers and email addresses with Facebook and have not changed them since 2019 are advised to watch out for possible smishing attacks, spam calls, and fraud.
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Data_Breaches
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New Zoom Screen-Sharing Bug Lets Other Users Access Restricted Apps
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https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/new-zoom-screen-sharing-bug-lets-other.html
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A newly discovered glitch in Zoom's screen sharing feature can accidentally leak sensitive information to other attendees in a call, according to the latest findings.
Tracked as CVE-2021-28133, the unpatched security vulnerability makes it possible to reveal contents of applications that are not shared, but only briefly, thereby making it harder to exploit it in the wild.
It's worth pointing out that the screen sharing functionality in Zoom lets users share an entire desktop or phone screen, or limit sharing to one or more specific applications, or a portion of a screen. The issue stems from the fact that a second application that's overlayed on top of an already shared application can reveal its contents for a short period of time.
"When a Zoom user shares a specific application window via the 'share screen' functionality, other meeting participants can briefly see contents of other application windows which were not explicitly shared," SySS researchers Michael Strametz and Matthias Deeg noted. "The contents of not shared application windows can, for instance, be seen for a short period of time by other users when those windows overlay the shared application window and get into focus."
The flaw, which was tested on versions 5.4.3 and 5.5.4 across both Windows and Linux clients, is said to have been disclosed to the videoconferencing company on December 2, 2020. The lack of a fix even after three months could be attributed in part to the difficulty in exploiting the vulnerability.
But nonetheless, this could have serious consequences depending on the nature of the inadvertently shared data, the researchers warned, adding a malicious participant of a Zoom meeting can take advantage of the weakness by making use of a screen capture tool to record the meeting and playback the recording to view the private information.
When reached for a response, a Zoom spokesperson said it's working to address the issue. "Zoom takes all reports of security vulnerabilities seriously," the company told The Hacker News via email. "We are aware of this issue, and are working to resolve it."
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Data_Breaches
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Data Breach Exposes 1.6 Million Jobless Claims Filed in the Washington State
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https://thehackernews.com/2021/02/data-breach-exposes-16-million-jobless.html
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The Office of the Washington State Auditor (SAO) on Monday said it's investigating a security incident that resulted in the compromise of personal information of more than 1.6 million people who filed for unemployment claims in the state in 2020.
The SAO blamed the breach on a software vulnerability in Accellion's File Transfer Appliance (FTA) service, which allows organizations to share sensitive documents with users outside their organization securely.
"During the week of January 25, 2021, Accellion confirmed that an unauthorized person gained access to SAO files by exploiting a vulnerability in Accellion's file transfer service," the SAO said in a statement.
The accessed information is said to have contained personal details of Washington state residents who filed unemployment insurance claims in 2020, as well as other data from local governments and state agencies.
The exact information that may have been compromised include:
Full name
Social security number
Driver's license
State identification number
Bank account number and bank routing number, and
Place of employment
The unauthorized access incident is believed to have occurred in late December of last year, although it appears the full scope of the intrusion wasn't made aware until Accellion disclosed earlier this month that its file transfer application was the "target of a sophisticated cyberattack."
The Palo Alto-based cloud solutions company said on January 11 that it was made aware of a vulnerability in its legacy FTA software in mid-December, following which it claimed it addressed the issue and released a patch "within 72 hours" to the less than 50 customers affected.
Accellion also said it's contracting with an "industry-leading cybersecurity forensics firm" to investigate the incident.
Given that the compromised information can be abused to carry out identity theft or fraud, the SAO said it's in the process of arranging measures to protect the identities of those whose information may have been contained within SAO's files.
In the meanwhile, the agency recommends reviewing account statements and credit reports, notifying financial institutions of any suspicious activity, and reporting any suspected incidents of identity theft to law enforcement.
It's worth noting that Accellion's FTA software was used as an attack vector to strike two other organizations, including the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ), in recent weeks.
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Data_Breaches
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Police Arrest 21 WeLeakInfo Customers Who Bought Breached Personal Data
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/police-arrest-21-weleakinfo-customers.html
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21 people have been arrested across the UK as part of a nationwide cyber crackdown targeting customers of WeLeakInfo[.]com, a now-defunct online service that had been previously selling access to data hacked from other websites.
The suspects used stolen personal credentials to commit further cyber and fraud offences, the UK National Crime Agency (NCA) said.
Of the 21 arrested — all men aged between 18 and 38 — nine have been detained on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offences, nine for Fraud offences, and three are under investigation for both. The NCA also seized over £41,000 in bitcoin from the arrested individuals.
Earlier this January, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the NCA, the Netherlands National Police Corps, the German Bundeskriminalamt, and the Police Service of Northern Ireland jointly seized the domain of WeLeakInfo.com.
Launched in 2017, the service provided its users a search engine to access the personal information illegally obtained from over 10,000 data breaches and containing over 12 billion indexed stolen credentials, including, for example, names, email addresses, usernames, phone numbers, and passwords for online accounts.
On top of that, WeLeakInfo offered subscription plans, allowing unlimited searches and access to the results of these data breaches during the subscription period that lasted anywhere from one day ($2), one week ($7), one month ($25), or three months ($70).
The cheap subscriptions made the website accessible to even entry-level, apprentice-type hackers, letting them get hold of a huge cache of data for as little as $2 a day, and in turn, use those stolen passwords to mount credential stuffing attacks.
Following the domain's seizure in January, two 22-year-old men, one in the Netherlands and another in Northern Ireland, were arrested in connection with running the site. WeLeakInfo's Twitter handle has since gone quiet.
The NCA said besides being customers of the website, some of the arrested men had also purchased other cybercrime tools such as remote access Trojans (RATs) and crypters, with three other subjects found to be in possession of indecent images of children.
"Cyber criminals rely on the fact that people duplicate passwords on multiple sites and data breaches create the opportunity for fraudsters to exploit that," NCA's Paul Creffield said. "Password hygiene is therefore extremely important."
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Data_Breaches
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Microsoft Says Its Systems Were Also Breached in Massive SolarWinds Hack
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/microsoft-says-its-systems-were-also.html
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The massive state-sponsored espionage campaign that compromised software maker SolarWinds also targeted Microsoft, as the unfolding investigation into the hacking spree reveals the incident may have been far more wider in scope, sophistication, and impact than previously thought.
News of Microsoft's compromise was first reported by Reuters, which also said the company's own products were then used to strike other victims by leveraging its cloud offerings, citing people familiar with the matter.
The Windows maker, however, denied the threat actor had infiltrated its production systems to stage further attacks against its customers.
In a statement to The Hacker News via email, the company said —
"Like other SolarWinds customers, we have been actively looking for indicators of this actor and can confirm that we detected malicious SolarWinds binaries in our environment, which we isolated and removed. We have not found evidence of access to production services or customer data. Our investigations, which are ongoing, have found absolutely no indications that our systems were used to attack others."
Characterizing the hack as "a moment of reckoning," Microsoft president Brad Smith said it has notified over 40 customers located in Belgium, Canada, Israel, Mexico, Spain, the UAE, the UK, and the US that were singled out by the attackers. 44% of the victims are in the information technology sector, including software firms, IT services, and equipment providers.
CISA Issues New Advisory
The development comes as the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a fresh advisory, stating the "APT actor [behind the compromises] has demonstrated patience, operational security, and complex tradecraft in these intrusions."
"This threat poses a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations," it added.
But in a twist, the agency also said it identified additional initial infection vectors, other than the SolarWinds Orion platform, that have been leveraged by the adversary to mount the attacks, including a previously stolen key to circumvent Duo's multi-factor authentication (MFA) to access the mailbox of a user via Outlook Web App (OWA) service.
Digital forensics firm Volexity, which tracks the actor under the moniker Dark Halo, said the MFA bypass was one of the three incidents between late 2019 and 2020 aimed at a US-based think tank.
The entire intrusion campaign came to light earlier this week when FireEye disclosed it had detected a breach that also pilfered its Red Team penetration testing tools.
Since then, a number of agencies have been found to be attacked, including the US departments of Treasury, Commerce, Homeland Security, and Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and several state department networks.
While many details continue to remain unclear, the revelation about new modes of attack raises more questions about the level of access the attackers were able to gain across government and corporate systems worldwide.
Microsoft, FireEye, and GoDaddy Create a Killswitch
Over the last few days, Microsoft, FireEye, and GoDaddy seized control over one of the main GoDaddy domains — avsvmcloud[.]com — that was used by the hackers to communicate with the compromised systems, reconfiguring it to create a killswitch that would prevent the SUNBURST malware from continuing to operate on victims' networks.
For its part, SolarWinds has not yet disclosed how exactly the attacker managed to gain extensive access to its systems to be able to insert malware into the company's legitimate software updates.
Recent evidence, however, points to a compromise of its build and software release system. An estimated 18,000 Orion customers are said to have downloaded the updates containing the back door.
Symantec, which earlier uncovered more than 2,000 systems belonging to 100 customers that received the trojanized SolarWinds Orion updates, has now confirmed the deployment of a separate second-stage payload called Teardrop that's used to install the Cobalt Strike Beacon against select targets of interest.
The hacks are believed to be the work of APT29, a Russian threat group also known as Cozy Bear, which has been linked to a series of breaches of critical US infrastructure over the past year.
The latest slew of intrusions has also led CISA, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to issue a joint statement, stating the agencies are gathering intelligence in order to attribute, pursue, and disrupt the responsible threat actors.
Calling for stronger steps to hold nation-states accountable for cyberattacks, Smith said the attacks represent "an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world."
"In effect, this is not just an attack on specific targets, but on the trust and reliability of the world's critical infrastructure in order to advance one nation's intelligence agency," he added.
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Data_Breaches
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US Agencies and FireEye Were Hacked Using SolarWinds Software Backdoor
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/us-agencies-and-fireeye-were-hacked.html
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State-sponsored actors allegedly working for Russia have targeted the US Treasury, the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), and other government agencies to monitor internal email traffic as part of a widespread cyberespionage campaign.
The Washington Post, citing unnamed sources, said the latest attacks were the work of APT29 or Cozy Bear, the same hacking group that's believed to have orchestrated a breach of US-based cybersecurity firm FireEye a few days ago leading to the theft of its Red Team penetration testing tools.
The motive and the full scope of what intelligence was compromised remains unclear, but signs are that adversaries tampered with a software update released by Texas-based IT infrastructure provider SolarWinds earlier this year to infiltrate the systems of government agencies as well as FireEye and mount a highly-sophisticated supply chain attack.
"The compromise of SolarWinds' Orion Network Management Products poses unacceptable risks to the security of federal networks," said Brandon Wales, acting director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has released an emergency directive, urging federal civilian agencies to review their networks for suspicious activity and disconnect or power down SolarWinds Orion products immediately.
SolarWinds' networking and security products are used by more than 300,000 customers worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and education institutions.
It also serves several major US telecommunications companies, all five branches of the US Military, and other prominent government organizations such as the Pentagon, State Department, NASA, National Security Agency (NSA), Postal Service, NOAA, Department of Justice, and the Office of the President of the United States.
An Evasive Campaign to Distribute SUNBURST Backdoor
FireEye, which is tracking the ongoing intrusion campaign under the moniker "UNC2452," said the supply chain attack takes advantage of trojanized SolarWinds Orion business software updates in order to distribute a backdoor called SUNBURST.
"This campaign may have begun as early as Spring 2020 and is currently ongoing," FireEye said in a Sunday analysis. "Post compromise activity following this supply chain compromise has included lateral movement and data theft. The campaign is the work of a highly skilled actor and the operation was conducted with significant operational security."
This rogue version of SolarWinds Orion plug-in, besides masquerading its network traffic as the Orion Improvement Program (OIP) protocol, is said to communicate via HTTP to remote servers so as to retrieve and execute malicious commands ("Jobs") that cover the spyware gamut, including those for transferring files, executing files, profiling and rebooting the target system, and disabling system services.
Orion Improvement Program or OIP is chiefly used to collect performance and usage statistics data from SolarWinds users for product improvement purposes.
What's more, the IP addresses used for the campaign were obfuscated by VPN servers located in the same country as the victim to evade detection.
Microsoft also corroborated the findings in a separate analysis, stating the attack (which it calls "Solorigate") leveraged the trust associated with SolarWinds software to insert malicious code as part of a larger campaign.
"A malicious software class was included among many other legitimate classes and then signed with a legitimate certificate," the Windows maker said. The resulting binary included a backdoor and was then discreetly distributed into targeted organizations."
SolarWinds Releases Security Advisory
In a security advisory published by SolarWinds, the company said the attack targets versions 2019.4 through 2020.2.1 of the SolarWinds Orion Platform software that was released between March and June 2020, while recommending users to upgrade to Orion Platform release 2020.2.1 HF 1 immediately.
The firm, which is currently investigating the attack in coordination with FireEye and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, is also expected to release an additional hotfix, 2020.2.1 HF 2, on December 15, which replaces the compromised component and provides several extra security enhancements.
FireEye last week disclosed that it fell victim to a highly sophisticated foreign-government attack that compromised its software tools used to test the defenses of its customers.
Totaling as many as 60 in number, the stolen Red Team tools are a mix of publicly available tools (43%), modified versions of publicly available tools (17%), and those that were developed in-house (40%).
Furthermore, the theft also includes exploit payloads that leverage critical vulnerabilities in Pulse Secure SSL VPN (CVE-2019-11510), Microsoft Active Directory (CVE-2020-1472), Zoho ManageEngine Desktop Central (CVE-2020-10189), and Windows Remote Desktop Services (CVE-2019-0708).
The campaign, ultimately, appears to be a supply chain attack on a global scale, for FireEye said it detected this activity across several entities worldwide, spanning government, consulting, technology, telecom, and extractive firms in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
The indicators of compromise (IoCs) and other relevant attack signatures designed to counter SUNBURST can be accessed here.
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Data_Breaches
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Cybersecurity Firm FireEye Got Hacked; Red-Team Pentest Tools Stolen
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/cybersecurity-firm-fireeye-got-hacked.html
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FireEye, one of the largest cybersecurity firms in the world, said on Tuesday it became a victim of a state-sponsored attack by a "highly sophisticated threat actor" that stole its arsenal of Red Team penetration testing tools it uses to test the defenses of its customers.
The company said it's actively investigating the breach in coordination with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other key partners, including Microsoft.
It did not identify a specific culprit who might be behind the breach or disclose when the hack exactly took place.
However, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported that the FBI has turned over the investigation to its Russian specialists and that the attack is likely the work of APT29 (or Cozy Bear) — state-sponsored hackers affiliated with Russia's SVR Foreign Intelligence Service — citing unnamed sources.
As of writing, the hacking tools have not been exploited in the wild, nor do they contain zero-day exploits, although malicious actors in possession of these tools could abuse them to subvert security barriers and take control of targeted systems.
Red Team tools are often used by cybersecurity organizations to mimic those used in real-world attacks with the goal of assessing a company's detection and response capabilities and evaluating the security posture of enterprise systems.
The company said the adversary also accessed some internal systems and primarily sought information about government clients but added there's no evidence that the attacker exfiltrated customer information related to incident response or consulting engagements or the metadata collected by its security software.
"This attack is different from the tens of thousands of incidents we have responded to throughout the years," FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia wrote in a blog post.
"The attackers tailored their world-class capabilities specifically to target and attack FireEye. They are highly trained in operational security and executed with discipline and focus. They operated clandestinely, using methods that counter security tools and forensic examination. They used a novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past."
The accessed Red Team tools run the gamut from scripts used for automating reconnaissance to entire frameworks that are similar to publicly available technologies such as CobaltStrike and Metasploit. A few others are modified versions of publicly available tools designed to evade basic security detection mechanisms, while the rest are proprietary attack utilities developed in-house.
To minimize the potential impact of the theft of these tools, the company has also released 300 countermeasures, including a list of 16 previously disclosed critical flaws that should be addressed to limit the effectiveness of the Red Team tools.
If anything, the development is yet another indication that no companies, counting cybersecurity firms, are immune to targeted attacks.
Major cybersecurity firms such as Kaspersky Lab, RSA Security, Avast, and Bit9 have previously fallen victims to damaging hacks over the past decade.
The incident also bears faint similarities to The Shadow Brokers' leak of offensive hacking tools used by the US National Security Agency in 2016, which also included the EternalBlue zero-day exploit that was later weaponized to distribute the WannaCry ransomware.
"Security companies are a prime target for nation-state operators for many reasons, but not least of all is [the] ability to gain valuable insights about how to bypass security controls within their ultimate targets," Crowdstrike's co-founder and former CTO Dmitri Alperovitch said.
The release of red team tools stolen by the adversary "will go a long way to mitigating the potential impact of this intrusion for organizations all over the world," he added.
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Data_Breaches
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Beware: New Android Spyware Found Posing as Telegram and Threema Apps
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/10/android-mobile-hacking.html
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A hacking group known for its attacks in the Middle East, at least since 2017, has recently been found impersonating legitimate messaging apps such as Telegram and Threema to infect Android devices with a new, previously undocumented malware.
"Compared to the versions documented in 2017, Android/SpyC23.A has extended spying functionality, including reading notifications from messaging apps, call recording and screen recording, and new stealth features, such as dismissing notifications from built-in Android security apps," cybersecurity firm ESET said in a Wednesday analysis.
First detailed by Qihoo 360 in 2017 under the moniker Two-tailed Scorpion (aka APT-C-23 or Desert Scorpion), the mobile malware has been deemed "surveillanceware" for its abilities to spy on the devices of targeted individuals, exfiltrating call logs, contacts, location, messages, photos, and other sensitive documents in the process.
In 2018, Symantec discovered a newer variant of the campaign that employed a malicious media player as a lure to grab information from the device and trick victims into installing additional malware.
Then earlier this year, Check Point Research detailed fresh signs of APT-C-23 activity when Hamas operators posed as young teenage girls on Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram to lure Israeli soldiers into installing malware-infected apps on their phones.
The latest version of the spyware detailed by ESET expands on these features, including the ability to collect information from social media and messaging apps via screen recording and screenshots, and even capture incoming and outgoing calls in WhatsApp and read the text of notifications from social media apps, including WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook, Skype, and Messenger.
The infection begins when a victim visits a fake Android app store called "DigitalApps," and downloads apps such as Telegram, Threema, and weMessage, suggesting that the group's motivation behind impersonating messaging apps is to "justify the various permissions requested by the malware."
In addition to requesting invasive permissions to read notifications, turn off Google Play Protect, and record a user's screen under the guise of security and privacy features, the malware communicates with its command-and-control (C2) server to register the newly infected victim and transmit the device information.
The C2 servers, which typically masquerade as websites under maintenance, are also responsible for relaying the commands to the compromised phone, which can be used to record audio, restart Wi-Fi, uninstall any app installed on the device, among others.
What's more, it also comes equipped with a new feature that allows it to stealthily make a call while creating a black screen overlay to mask the call activity.
"Our research shows that the APT-C-23 group is still active, enhancing its mobile toolset and running new operations. Android/SpyC32.A – the group's newest spyware version — features several improvements making it more dangerous to victims," ESET said.
Apps downloaded from fraudulent third-party app stores has been a conduit for Android malware in recent years. It's always essential to stick to official sources to limit risk, and scrutinize permissions requested by apps before installing them on the device.
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Data_Breaches
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Russian Who Hacked LinkedIn, Dropbox Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/10/russian-linkedin-hacker.html
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A Russian hacker who was found guilty of hacking LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Formspring over eight years ago has finally been sentenced to 88 months in United States prison, that's more than seven years by a federal court in San Francisco this week.
Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin, 32, of Moscow hacked into servers belonging to three American social media firms, including LinkedIn, Dropbox, and now-defunct social-networking firm Formspring, and stole data on over 200 million users.
Between March and July 2012, Nikulin hacked into the computers of LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Formspring, and installed malware on them, which allowed him to remotely download user databases of over 117 Million LinkedIn users and more than 68 Million Dropbox users.
According to the prosecutor, Nikulin also worked with unnamed co-conspirators of a Russian-speaking cybercriminal forum to sell customer data he stole as a result of his hacks.
Besides hacking into the three social media firms, Nikulin has also been accused of gaining access to LinkedIn and Formspring employees' credentials, which helped him carry out the computer hacks.
"The Court also found that Automattic, parent company of Wordpress.com, was the victim of an intrusion by defendant, although there was no evidence that defendant stole any customer credentials," the Justice Department said.
Nikulin was arrested in Prague on October 5, 2016, by Interpol agents working in collaboration with the FBI, and extradited to the United States in March 2018 after a long extradition battle between the U.S. and Russia.
In 2016, the hacker was charged with nine felony counts of computer intrusion, aggravated identity theft, causing damage to a protected computer, trafficking in unauthorized access devices, and conspiracy.
However, after a long delay of trials due to the coronavirus pandemic, Nikulin was found guilty by a federal jury of the United States in early July this year and was sentenced to 88 months in prison on September 29.
U.S. District Judge William H. Alsup convicted Nikulin of selling stolen usernames and passwords, installing malware on protected computers, conspiracy, computer intrusion, and aggravated identity theft.
Prior to the sentencing hearing on September 29, federal prosecutors sought a sentence of 145 months in prison, that's over 12 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and restitution.
Nikulin has been in U.S. custody since his extradition from the Czech Republic and will be serving his sentence effect immediately.
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Data_Breaches
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Experian South Africa Suffers Data Breach Affecting Millions; Attacker Identified
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/08/experian-data-breach-attack.html
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The South African arm of one of the world's largest credit check companies Experian yesterday announced a data breach incident that exposed personal information of millions of its customers.
While Experian itself didn't mention the number of affect customers, in a report, the South African Banking Risk Information Centre—an anti-fraud and banking non-profit organization who worked with Experian to investigate the breach—disclosed that the attacker had reportedly stolen data of 24 million South Africans and 793,749 business entities.
Notably, according to the company, the suspected attacker behind this breach had already been identified, and the stolen data of its customers had successfully been deleted from his/her computing devices.
"We have identified the suspect and confirm that Experian South Africa was successful in obtaining and executing an Anton Piller order which resulted in the individual's hardware being impounded and the misappropriated data being secured and deleted."
Experian South Africa has already reported the breach to law enforcement and the appropriate regulatory authorities.
The company claims there is no evidence indicating whether the stolen data includes consumers' credit or financial information or used for fraudulent purposes before authorities had it deleted.
"Our investigations also show that the suspect had intended to use the data to create marketing leads to offer insurance and credit-related services."
"The compromise of personal information can create opportunities for criminals to impersonate you but does not guarantee access to your banking profile or accounts. However, criminals can use this information to trick you into disclosing your confidential banking details," says SABRIC CEO, Nischal Mewalall.
Besides releasing this information, SAFPS also recommended that credit reporting agency customers should immediately apply for a free Protective Registration listing with Southern Africa Fraud Prevention Service that has been designed to alert users when their identity is compromised.
You can also regularly check your credit report for free here.
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Data_Breaches
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OkCupid Dating App Flaws Could've Let Hackers Read Your Private Messages
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/07/hacking-okcupid-account.html
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Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed several security issues in popular online dating platform OkCupid that could potentially let attackers remotely spy on users' private information or perform malicious actions on behalf of the targeted accounts.
According to a report shared with The Hacker News, researchers from Check Point found that the flaws in OkCupid's Android and web applications could allow the theft of users' authentication tokens, users IDs, and other sensitive information such as email addresses, preferences, sexual orientation, and other private data.
After Check Point researchers responsibly shared their findings with OkCupid, the Match Group-owned company fixed the issues, stating, "not a single user was impacted by the potential vulnerability."
The Chain of Flaws
The flaws were identified as part of reverse engineering of OkCupid's Android app version 40.3.1, which was released on April 29 earlier this year. Since then, there have been 15 updates to the app with the most recent version (43.3.2) hitting Google Play Store yesterday.
Check Point said OkCupid's use of deep links could enable a bad actor to send a custom link defined in the app's manifest file to open a browser window with JavaScript enabled. Any such request was found to return the users' cookies.
The researchers also uncovered a separate flaw in OkCupid's settings functionality that makes it vulnerable to an XSS attack by injecting malicious JavaScript code using the "section" parameter as follows: "https://www.okcupid.com/settings?section=value"
The aforementioned XSS attack can be augmented further by loading a JavaScript payload from an attacker-controlled server to steal authentication tokens, profile information, and user preferences, and transmit the amassed data back to the server.
"Users' cookies are sent to the [OkCupid] server since the XSS payload is executed in the context of the application's WebView," the researchers said, outlining their method to capture the token information. "The server responds with a vast JSON containing the users' id and the authentication token."
Once in possession of the user ID and the token, an adversary can send a request to the "https://www.OkCupid.com:443/graphql" endpoint to fetch all the information associated with the victim's profile (email address, sexual orientation, height, family status, and other personal preferences) as well as carry out actions on behalf of the compromised individual, such as send messages and change profile data.
However, a full account hijack is not possible as the cookies are protected with HTTPOnly, mitigating the risk of a client-side script accessing the protected cookie.
Lastly, an oversight in the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) policy of the API server could have permitted an attacker to craft requests from any origin (e.g. "https://okcupidmeethehacker.com") in order to get hold of the user ID and authentication token, and subsequently, use that information to extract profile details and messages using the API's "profile" and "messages" endpoints.
Remember Ashley Madison Breach and Blackmail Threats?
Although the vulnerabilities were not exploited in the wild, the episode is yet another reminder of how bad actors could have taken advantage of the flaws to threaten victims with black and extortion.
After Ashley Madison, an adult dating service catering to married individuals seeking partners for affairs was hacked in 2015 and information about its 32 million users was posted to the dark web, it led to a rise in phishing and sextortion campaigns, with blackmailers reportedly sending personalized emails to the users, threatening to reveal their membership to friends and family unless they pay money.
"The dire need for privacy and data security becomes far more crucial when so much private and intimate information is being stored, managed and analyzed in an app," the researchers concluded. "The app and platform was created to bring people together, but of course where people go, criminals will follow, looking for easy pickings."
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Data_Breaches
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Hackers Using Google Analytics to Bypass Web Security and Steal Credit Cards
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/06/google-analytics-hacking.html
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Researchers reported on Monday that hackers are now exploiting Google's Analytics service to stealthily pilfer credit card information from infected e-commerce sites.
According to several independent reports from PerimeterX, Kaspersky, and Sansec, threat actors are now injecting data-stealing code on the compromised websites in combination with tracking code generated by Google Analytics for their own account, letting them exfiltrate payment information entered by users even in conditions where content security policies are enforced for maximum web security.
"Attackers injected malicious code into sites, which collected all the data entered by users and then sent it via Analytics," Kaspersky said in a report published yesterday. "As a result, the attackers could access the stolen data in their Google Analytics account."
The cybersecurity firm said it found about two dozen infected websites across Europe and North and South America that specialized in selling digital equipment, cosmetics, food products, and spare parts.
Bypassing Content Security Policy
The attack hinges on the premise that e-commerce websites using Google's web analytics service for tracking visitors have whitelisted the associated domains in their content security policy (CSP).
CSP is an added security measure that helps detect and mitigate threats stemming from cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and other forms of code injection attacks, including those embraced by various Magecart groups.
The security feature allows webmasters to define a set of domains the web browser should be allowed to interact with for a specific URL, thereby preventing the execution of untrusted code.
"The source of the problem is that the CSP rule system isn't granular enough," PerimeterX's VP of research Amir Shaked said. "Recognizing and stopping the above malicious JavaScript request requires advanced visibility solutions that can detect the access and exfiltration of sensitive user data (in this case, the user's email address and password)."
To harvest data using this technique, all that is needed is a small piece of JavaScript code that transmits the collected details like credentials and payment information through an event and other parameters that Google Analytics uses to uniquely identify different actions performed on a site.
"Administrators write *.google-analytics.com into the Content-Security-Policy header (used for listing resources from which third-party code can be downloaded), allowing the service to collect data. What's more, the attack can be implemented without downloading code from external sources," Kaspersky noted.
To make the attacks more covert, the attackers also ascertain if developer mode — a feature that's often used to spot network requests and security errors, among other things — is enabled in the visitor's browser, and proceed only if the result of that check is negative.
A "Novel" Campaign Since March
In a separate report released yesterday, Netherlands-based Sansec, which tracks digital skimming attacks, uncovered a similar campaign since March 17 that delivered the malicious code on several stores using a JavaScript code that's hosted on Google's Firebase.
For obfuscation, the actor behind the operation created a temporary iFrame to load an attacker-controlled Google Analytics account. The credit card data entered on payment forms is then encrypted and sent to the analytics console from where it's recovered using the encryption key earlier used.
Given the widespread use of Google Analytics in these attacks, countermeasures like CSP will not work if attackers take advantage of an already allowed domain to hijack sensitive information.
"A possible solution would come from adaptive URLs, adding the ID as part of the URL or subdomain to allow admins to set CSP rules that restrict data exfiltration to other accounts," Shaked concluded.
"A more granular future direction for strengthening CSP direction to consider as part of the CSP standard is XHR proxy enforcement. This will essentially create a client-side WAF that can enforce a policy on where specific data field[s] are allowed to be transmitted."
As a customer, unfortunately, there isn't much you can do to safeguard yourself from formjacking attacks. Turning on developer mode in browsers can help when making online purchases.
But it's essential that you watch out for any instances of unauthorized purchases or identity theft.
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Data_Breaches
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Hackers Leaked 269 GB of U.S. Police and Fusion Centers Data Online
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/06/law-enforcement-data-breach.html
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A group of hacktivists and transparency advocates has published a massive 269 GB of data allegedly stolen from more than 200 police departments, fusion centers, and other law enforcement agencies across the United States.
Dubbed BlueLeaks, the exposed data leaked by the DDoSecrets group contains hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents from the past ten years with official and personal information.
DDoSecrets, or Distributed Denial of Secrets, is a transparency collective similar to WikiLeaks, which publicly publishes data and classified information submitted by leakers and hackers while claiming the organization itself never gets involved in the exfiltration of data.
According to the hacktivist group, BlueLeaks dump includes "police and FBI reports, bulletins, guides and more," which "provides unique insights into law enforcement and a wide array of government activities, including thousands of documents mentioning COVID19.
As you can see in the screenshot below, a quick analysis of the BlueLeaks dump shows the data contains over millions of files including images, documents, videos, web pages, text files, emails, audio files, and more, though it's yet to be investigated how many files are classified and are not supposed to be public.
Some alerts and guides leaked in BlueLeaks also contained intelligence on the protests, including the recent countrywide Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. following the death of George Floyd at the time he was in the custody of Minneapolis police.
Some of the U.S. agencies listed in BlueLeaks are:
Alabama Fusion Center
Austin Regional Intelligence Center
Boston Regional Intelligence Center
Colorado Information Analysis Center
California Narcotic Officers' Association
Delaware Information and Analysis Center
FBI Houston Citizens Academy Alumni Association
FBI National Academy Association Arkansas/Missouri Chapter
FBI National Academy Association Michigan Chapter
FBI National Academy Association of Texas
It appears that the source of this massive data stems from a security breach at Houston-based web hosting company 'Netsential Inc,' where the webserver for National Fusion Center Association (NFCA) is hosted, security blogger Krebs reported.
Fusion centers are basically information centers that enable intelligence sharing between local, state, tribal, territorial law enforcement and federal agencies, maximizing their ability to detect, prevent, investigate, and respond to criminal and terrorist activities.
In a statement, NFCA confirmed Krebs that the "dates of the files in the leak actually span nearly 24 years — from August 1996 through June 19, 2020 — and that the documents include names, email addresses, phone numbers, PDF documents, images, and a large number of text, video, CSV and ZIP files."
Netsential confirmed that a threat actor had leveraged a compromised Netsential customer user account and the web platform's upload feature and exfiltrated other Netsential customer data, including several U.S. police agencies, including Fusion Centers.
Netsential is the same web hosting company that was previously abused by attackers to infect targeted victims with ransomware by sending spoofed spear-phishing emails disguised as NFCA.
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Data_Breaches
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Any Indian DigiLocker Account Could've Been Accessed Without Password
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/06/aadhar-digilocker-hacked.html
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The Indian Government said it has addressed a critical vulnerability in its secure document wallet service Digilocker that could have potentially let a remote attacker bypass mobile one-time passwords (OTP) and sign in as other users.
Discovered separately by two independent bug bounty researchers, Mohesh Mohan and Ashish Gahlot, the vulnerability could have been exploited easily to unauthorisedly access sensitive documents uploaded by targeted users' on the Government-operated platform.
"The OTP function lacks authorization which makes it possible to perform OTP validation with submitting any valid users details and then manipulation flow to sign in as a totally different user," Mohesh Mohan said in a disclosure shared with The Hacker News.
With over 38 million registered users, Digilocker is a cloud-based repository that acts as a digital platform to facilitate online processing of documents and speedier delivery of various government-to-citizen services. It's linked to a user's mobile number and Aadhar ID—a unique identity number (UID) issued to every resident of India.
According to Mohan, all an attacker needs to know is either victim's Aadhaar ID or linked mobile number or username to unauthorizedly access a targeted Digilocker account, prompting the service to send an OTP and subsequently exploiting the flaw to bypass the sign-in process.
It's worth noting that the mobile app version of Digilocker also comes with a 4-digit PIN for an added layer of security. But the researchers said it was possible to modify the API calls to authenticate the PIN by associating the PIN to another user (identified with a version-5 UUID) and successfully login in as the victim.
This means "you can do the SMS OTP [verification] as one user and submit the pin of a second user, and finally, you will end up logging as the second user," Mohan said.
What's more, the lack of authorization for the API endpoint used to set the secret PIN effectively implies the API can be exploited to reset the PIN linked to a random user using the individual's UUID.
"There is no session-related information on the POST request, so it's not bound to any user," Mohan added.
In addition to the issues mentioned above, the API calls from mobile apps were secured by basic authentication that can be circumvented by removing a header flag "is_encrypted: 1." The application was also found to implement a weak SSL pinning mechanism, making them vulnerable to a bypass using tools like Frida.
After the flaw was reported to CERT-In on May 10 by Mohan and to DigiLocker on 16th May by Ashish, the cyber agency said the issue was fixed on May 28.
"The nature of the vulnerability was such that an individual's DigiLocker account could potentially get compromised if the attacker knew the username for that particular account," Digilocker said in a tweet last week acknowledging the flaw. "It was not a vulnerability that could let anyone get access to [the] DigiLocker account of anyone whose username and other details were not known."
"Upon analysis, it was discovered that this vulnerability had crept in the code when some new features were added recently. The vulnerability was patched on a priority basis by the technical team within a day of getting the alert from CERT-In. This was not an attack on infrastructure, and no data, database, storage, or encryption was compromised," the team added.
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Data_Breaches
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Joomla Resources Directory (JRD) Portal Suffers Data Breach
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/06/joomla-data-breach.html
|
Joomla, one of the most popular Open-source content management systems (CMS), last week announced a new data breach impacting 2,700 users who have an account with its resources directory (JRD) website, i.e., resources.joomla.org.
The breach exposed affected users' personal information, such as full names, business addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords.
The company said the incident came to light during an internal website audit that revealed that a member of the Joomla Resources Directory (JRD) team stored a full unencrypted backup of the JRD website on an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket owned by the third-party company.
The affected JRD portal lists developers and service providers specialized in Joomla, allowing registered users to extend their CMS with additional functionalities.
Joomla said the investigation is still ongoing and that accesses to the website have been temporarily suspended. It has also reached out to the concerned third-party to get the data deleted. It's not clear if any party found the unencrypted backup and accessed the information.
The details that could have been potentially accessed by an unauthorized third-party are as follows:
Full names
Business addresses
Business email addresses
Business phone numbers
Company URLs
Nature of business
Encrypted passwords (hashed)
IP addresses
Newsletter subscription preferences
The impact of the breach is said to be low, given that most of the information is already in the public domain.
In addition to mandating a password reset for all impacted accounts, it's recommended to change them on other sites that reuse the same password to prevent credential stuffing attacks.
As a consequence of the audit, Joomla has removed all users who've not logged in before January 1st, 2019, as well as several unused groups. Furthermore, it has enabled two-factor authentication and rolled out security fixes on its platform.
"Even if we don't have any evidence about data access, we highly recommend people who have an account on the Joomla Resources Directory and use the same password (or combination of an email address and password) on other services to immediately change their password for security reasons," Joomla said in the advisory.
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Data_Breaches
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Brazil's Biggest Cosmetic Brand Natura Exposes Personal Details of Its Users
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/05/natura-data-breach.html
|
Brazil's biggest cosmetics company Natura accidentally left hundreds of gigabytes of its customers' personal and payment-related information publicly accessible online that could have been accessed by anyone without authentication.
SafetyDetective researcher Anurag Sen last month discovered two unprotected Amazon-hosted servers—with 272GB and 1.3TB in size—belonging to Natura that consisted of more than 192 million records.
According to the report Anurag shared with The Hacker News, the exposed data includes personally identifiable information on 250,000 Natura customers, their account login cookies, along with the archives containing logs from the servers and users.
Worryingly, the leaked information also includes Moip payment account details with access tokens for nearly 40,000 wirecard.com.br users who integrated it with their Natura accounts.
"Around 90% of users were Brazilian customers, although other nationalities were also present, including customers from Peru," Anurag said.
"The compromised server contained website and mobile site API logs, thereby exposing all production server information. Furthermore, several 'Amazon bucket names' were mentioned in the leak, including PDF documents referring to formal agreements between various parties," Anurag said.
More precisely, the leaked sensitive personal information of customers includes their:
Full name
Mother's maiden name
Date of Birth
Nationality
Gender
Hashed login passwords with salts
Username and nickname
MOIP account details
API credentials with unencrypted passwords
Recent purchases
Telephone number
Email and physical addresses
Access token for wirecard.com.br
Besides this, the unprotected server also had a secret .pem certificate file that contains the key/password to the EC2 Amazon server where Natura website is hosted.
If exploited, the key to the server potentially could have allowed attackers to directly inject a digital skimmer directly into the company's official website to steal users' payment card details in real-time.
"Exposed details about the backend, as well as keys to servers, could be leveraged to conduct further attacks and allow deeper penetration into existing systems," the researcher warned.
SafetyDetective tried reporting its researcher's findings directly to the affected company last month but failed to receive any response on time, after which it contacted Amazon services, who then asked the company to secure both the servers immediately.
At the time of writing, it's unknown if the unprotected servers and the sensitive data stored on them were also accessed by a malicious actor before they went offline.
So, if you have an account with Natura, you are advised to stay vigilant against identity theft, change your account password and keep a close eye on your payment card transactions for signs of any suspicious activity.
"Instances of personally identifiable information being exposed could potentially lead to identity theft and fraud since they can be used by attackers for identification in various sites and locations," the researcher added. "The risk of phishing and phone scams is also raised by the Natura data leak."
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Data_Breaches
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British Airline EasyJet Suffers Data Breach Exposing 9 Million Customers' Data
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/05/easyjet-data-breach-hacking.html
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British low-cost airline EasyJet today admitted that the company has fallen victim to a cyber-attack, which it labeled "highly sophisticated," exposing email addresses and travel details of around 9 million of its customers.
In an official statement released today, EasyJet confirmed that of the 9 million affected users, a small subset of customers, i.e., 2,208 customers, have also had their credit card details stolen, though no passport details were accessed.
The airline did not disclose precisely how the breach happened, when it happened, when the company discovered it, how the sophisticated attackers unauthorizedly managed to gain access to the private information of its customers, and for how long they had that access to the airline's systems.
However, EasyJet assured its users that the company had closed off the unauthorized access following the discovery and that it found "no evidence that any personal information of any nature has been misused" by the attackers.
"As soon as we became aware of the attack, we took immediate steps to respond to and manage the incident and engaged leading forensic experts to investigate the issue," the company said in a statement published today.
EasyJet has also notified the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), Britain's data protection agency, and continues to investigate the breach incident to determine its extent and further enhance its security environment.
"We take the cybersecurity of our systems very seriously and have robust security measures in place to protect our customers' personal information. However, this is an evolving threat as cyber attackers get ever more sophisticated," says EasyJet Chief Executive Officer Johan Lundgren.
"Since we became aware of the incident, it has become clear that owing to COVID-19, there is heightened concern about personal data being used for online scams. Every business must continue to stay agile to stay ahead of the threat."
As a precautionary measure recommended by the ICO, the airline has started contacting all customers whose travel and credit card details were accessed in the breach to advise them to be "extra vigilant, particularly if they receive unsolicited communications."
Affected customers will be notified by May 26.
Last year, the ICO fined British Airways with a record of £183 million for failing to protect the personal information of around half a million of its customers during a 2018 security breach incident involving a Magecart-style card-skimming attack on its website.
Affected customers should be suspicious of phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cybercriminals to trick users into giving away further details of their accounts like passwords and banking information.
Affected customers exposing their credit card details are advised to block the affected cards and request a new one from their respective financial institution, and always keep a close eye on your bank and payment card statements for any unusual activity and report to the bank if you find any.
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Data_Breaches
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DigitalOcean Data Leak Incident Exposed Some of Its Customers Data
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/05/digitalocean-data-breach.html
|
DigitalOcean, one of the biggest modern web hosting platforms, recently hit with a concerning data leak incident that exposed some of its customers' data to unknown and unauthorized third parties.
Though the hosting company has not yet publicly released a statement, it did has started warning affected customers of the scope of the breach via an email.
According to the breach notification email that affected customers [1, 2] received, the data leak happened due to negligence where DigitalOcean 'unintentionally' left an internal document accessible to the Internet without requiring any password.
"This document contained your email address and/or account name (the name you gave your account at sign-up) as well as some data about your account that may have included Droplet count, bandwidth usage, some support or sales communications notes, and the amount you paid during 2018," the company said in the warning email as shown below.
Upon discovery, a quick digital investigation revealed that the exposed file containing customers' data was accessed by unauthorized third parties at least 15 times before the document was finally taken down.
"Our community is built on trust, so we are taking steps to make sure this doesn't happen again. We will be educating our employees on protecting customer data, establishing new procedures to alert us of potential exposures in a more timely manner, and making configuration changes to prevent future data exposure," the company added.
To be noted, this specific breach neither indicates the DigitalOcean website was compromised, nor the customers' login credentials were leaked to the attackers.
So, if you have an account with the hosting service, you don't have to rush into changing your password. However, the service also offers two-factor authentication that every user must enable to add an extra layer of security to their accounts.
The Hacker New has reached out to DigitalOcean for a comment, and the story will be updated with the response.
Update — A spokesperson for the company confirmed The Hacker News of the incident and shared a statement:
"We had a document that was discovered to be shared publicly and while we feel confident there was no malicious access to that document, we informed our customers regardless for transparency. Less than 1% of our customer base was impacted, and the only PII included in the file was account name and email address.
"This was not related to a malicious act to access our systems. Our customers trust us with their data and we believe that an unintended use of that data, no matter how small, is reason enough to be transparent."
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Data_Breaches
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Researcher Discloses 4 Zero-Day Bugs in IBM's Enterprise Security Software
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/04/ibm-data-risk-manager-vulnerabilities.html
|
A cybersecurity researcher today publicly disclosed technical details and PoC for 4 unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities affecting an enterprise security software offered by IBM after the company refused to acknowledge the responsibly submitted disclosure.
The affected premium product in question is IBM Data Risk Manager (IDRM) that has been designed to analyze sensitive business information assets of an organization and determine associated risks.
According to Pedro Ribeiro from Agile Information Security firm, IBM Data Risk Manager contains three critical severity vulnerabilities and a high impact bug, all listed below, which can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker reachable over the network, and when chained together could also lead to remote code execution as root.
Authentication Bypass
Command Injection
Insecure Default Password
Arbitrary File Download
Ribeiro successfully tested the flaws against IBM Data Risk Manager version 2.0.1 to 2.0.3, which is not the latest version of the software but believes they also work through 2.0.4 to the newest version 2.0.6 because "there is no mention of fixed vulnerabilities in any change log."
"IDRM is an enterprise security product that handles very sensitive information. A compromise of such a product might lead to a full-scale company compromise, as the tool has credentials to access other security tools, not to mention it contains information about critical vulnerabilities that affect the company," Ribeiro said.
Critical Zero-Day Vulnerabilities in IBM Data Risk Manager
In brief, the authentication bypass flaw exploits a logical error in the session ID feature to reset the password for any existing account, including the administrator.
The command injection flaw resides in the way IBM's enterprise security software lets users perform network scans using Nmap scripts, which apparently can be equipped with malicious commands when supplied by attackers.
According to the vulnerability disclosure, to SSH and run sudo commands, IDRM virtual appliance also has a built-in administrative user with username "a3user" and default password of "idrm," which if left unchanged, could let remote attackers take complete control over the targeted systems.
The last vulnerability resides in an API endpoint that allows authenticated users to download log files from the system. However, according to the researcher, one of the parameters to this endpoint suffers from a directory traversal flaw that could let malicious users download any file from the system.
Besides technical details, the researcher has also released two Metasploit modules for authentication bypass, remote code execution, and arbitrary file download issues.
Ribeiro claims to have reported this issue to IBM via CERT/CC and in response, the company refused to accept the vulnerability report, saying: " We have assessed this report and closed as being out of scope for our vulnerability disclosure program since this product is only for "enhanced" support paid for by our customers."
In response Ribeiro said, "In any case, I did not ask or expect a bounty since I do not have a HackerOne account and I don't agree with HackerOne's or IBM's disclosure terms there. I simply wanted to disclose these to IBM responsibly and let them fix it."
The Hacker News has reached out to IBM, and we will update the article as more information becomes available.
Update:
An IBM spokesperson told The Hacker News that "a process error resulted in an improper response to the researcher who reported this situation to IBM. We have been working on mitigation steps and they will be discussed in a security advisory to be issued."
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Data_Breaches
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Marriott Suffers Second Breach Exposing Data of 5.2 Million Hotel Guests
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/03/marriott-data-breach.html
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International hotel chain Marriott today disclosed a data breach impacting nearly 5.2 million hotel guests, making it the second security incident to hit the company in recent years.
"At the end of February 2020, we identified that an unexpected amount of guest information may have been accessed using the login credentials of two employees at a franchise property," Marriott said in a statement.
"We believe this activity started in mid-January 2020. Upon discovery, we confirmed that the login credentials were disabled, immediately began an investigation, implemented heightened monitoring, and arranged resources to inform and assist guests."
The incident exposed guests' personal information such as contact details (name, mailing address, email address, and phone number), loyalty account information (account number and points balance), and additional information such as company, gender, dates of births, room preferences, and language preferences.
The hospitality giant said an investigation into the breach was ongoing, but said there was no evidence that Marriott Bonvoy account passwords or PINs, payment card information, passport information, national IDs, or driver's license numbers were compromised.
Marriott has also set up a self-service online portal for guests to check whether their personal details were involved in the breach, and what categories of information were exposed. In addition, it's offering affected users an option to enroll in IdentityWorks, a personal information monitoring service, free of charge for 1 year.
The company has already taken the step of disabling the passwords of Marriott Bonvoy members who had their information potentially exposed in the incident, and they will be notified to change their passwords during the next login, as well as prompted to enable multi-factor authentication.
The incident follows a 2014 compromise of Starwood Hotels guest reservation database, which was acquired by Marriott in 2016. The breach, which exposed personal details of over 339 million guests globally, wasn't detected until November 2018, leading to it paying a fine of £99 million ($123 million) to the UK's data privacy regulator Information Commissioner's Office under GDPR laws.
"The kinds of information disclosed in the latest Marriott breach might seem innocuous, but it is precisely this kind of intelligence that enables threat actors to better target attacks on consumers," Gerrit Lansing, STEALTHbits' Field CTO told The Hacker News via email today.
"Simply: the more I know about you, the better chance I have of fooling you. Compromised credentials remain one of the top vectors for this kind of compromise, and strong authentication before accessing sensitive information one of the best defenses."
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Data_Breaches
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How CISOs Should Prepare for Coronavirus Related Cybersecurity Threats
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/03/coronavirus-cybersecurity-ciso.html
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The Coronavirus is hitting hard on the world's economy, creating a high volume of uncertainty within organizations.
Cybersecurity firm Cynet today revealed new data, showing that the Coronavirus now has a significant impact on information security and that the crisis is actively exploited by threat actors.
In light of these insights, Cynet has also shared a few ways to best prepare for the Coronavirus derived threat landscape and provides a solution (learn more here) to protect employees that are working from home with their personal computers because of the Coronavirus.
The researchers identify two main trends – attacks that aim to steal remote user credentials and weaponized email attacks:
Remote User Credential Theft
The direct impact of the Coronavirus is a comprehensive quarantine policy that compels multiple organizations to allow their workforce to work from home to maintain business continuity.
This inevitably entails shifting a significant portion of the workload to be carried out remotely, introducing an exploitable opportunity for attackers.
The opportunity attackers see the mass use of remote login credentials to organizational resources that far exceed the norm. As a result, remote connections are established by employees and devices that have never done so before, meaning that an attacker could easily conceal a malicious login without being detected by the target organization's security team.
Cynet's global threat telemetry from the recent three weeks reveals that Italy features a sharp spike in phishing attacks in comparison to other territories, indicating that attackers are hunting in full force for user credentials.
In addition, the researchers also detect a respective spike both in detected anomalous logins to its customers' environments, as well as in customers actively reaching out to CyOps (Cynet MDR) to investigate suspicious logins to critical resources.
Correlating the two spikes validates that attackers are actively exploiting the Coronavirus derived havoc.
Weaponized Email Attacks
Employees that work from home often would do so from their personal computers, which are significantly less secure than the organizational ones, making them more vulnerable to malware attacks.
Besides, Cynet released today's figures that support the above claim. Here is the double spike Cynet sees within its customers from Italy of email-based attacks:
A closer look at the attacks reveals that they possess a considerable threat to organizations that do not have advanced protection in place:
While 21% of these emails featured simplistic attacks with a link to download a malicious executable embedded in the email body, the vast majority included more advanced capabilities such as malicious Macros and exploits or redirection to malicious websites – a challenge that surpasses the capabilities of most AV and email protection solutions.
Taking a closer look at how these attacks were blocked verifies that they should be regarded as a severe risk potential:
'The fact that only about 10% of the malware in these attacks was identified by its signature, indicates that the attackers behind these campaigns are using advanced attacking tools to take advantage of the situation', says Eyal Gruner, CEO, and Co-Founder of Cynet.
Moreover, there is another aspect to the Coronavirus impact. In many cases, the functioning of the security team itself is impaired due to missing team members in quarantine, making the detection of malicious activity even harder.
From conversations with these companies, it turns out that the operations of many security teams are significantly disturbed due to quarantined team members, causing them to use Cynet's MDR service more often to compensate for the lack of staff.
'We have reached out to our customers in Italy ', says Gruner, 'and they have confirmed that a significant part of their workforce works from home these days.'
To sum up the situation in Italy, employees working from home, security teams that are not fully operational and general atmosphere of uncertainty, create ideal conditions for attackers that seek to monetize the new situation through phishing, social engineering, and weaponized emails.
The data from Cynet's Italian install base should serve as an illustrative example of the cyber effect in a territory where Coronavirus has a high prevalence. While this is not yet the case for other countries, the rapid Coronavirus spread implies that the cyber threat landscape in Italy would soon be duplicated in other geolocations as well.
In order to efficiently confront these threats, CISOs should evaluate the defenses they have in place and see whether they provide protection against phishing and malicious logins.
As a breach protection platform, Cynet introduces a dedicated offering tailored to the new Coronavirus related cyber risks.
For both existing and new customers, Cynet will allow, free of charge (for 6 months), the deployment of its product, Cynet 360, on personal computers used by employees working from home.
Cynet massively adds staff to CyOps, its MDR services team, to be able to cover for companies with reduced security staff because of the Coronavirus.
Learn more about Cynet's offering here.
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Data_Breaches
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TrueFire Guitar Tutoring Website Suffers Magecart-style Credit Card Breach
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/03/truefire-guitar-tutoring-data-breach.html
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Online guitar tutoring website TrueFire has apparently suffered a 'Magecart' style data breach incident that may have potentially led to the exposure of its customers' personal information and payment card information.
TrueFire is one of the popular guitar tutoring websites with over 1 million users, where wanna-be-guitarists pay online to access a massive library of over 900 courses and 40,000 video lessons.
Though TrueFire hasn't yet publicly disclosed or acknowledged the breach, The Hacker News learned about the incident after a few affected customers posted online details of a notification they received from the company last week.
The Hacker News also found a copy of the same 'Notice Of Data Breach' uploaded recently to the website of Montana Department of Justice, specifically on a section where the government shares information on data breaches that also affect Montana residents.
Confirming the breach, the notification reveals that an attacker gained unauthorized access to the company's web server somewhere around mid last year and stole payment information of customers that were entered into its website for over five months, between August 3, 2019, and January 14, 2020.
"While we do not store credit card information on our website, it appears that the unauthorized person gained access to the site and could have accessed the data of consumers who made payment card purchases while that data was being entered," the breach notification says.
"We cannot state with certainty that your data was specifically accessed; however, you should know that the information that was potentially subject to unauthorized access includes your name, address, payment card account number, card expiration date, and security code," the breach notification says.
While the company didn't explain how the attackers managed to compromise its website or if they had injected a digital credit card skimmer on it, the scenario looks very similar to a Magecart style attack.
For those unaware, Magecart hackers typically compromise websites and secretly insert malicious JavaScript code into their checkout pages that silently captures payment information of customers making purchasing on the sites and then sends it to the attacker's remote server.
The company discovered this security incident on January 10 and claimed to have now patched the web vulnerability that allowed attackers to compromise its website in the first place.
Guitarists who made any online payment at the TrueFire website between last August and this January are advised to block the payment cards used on it and request a new one from their respective financial institution.
Other customers are also advised to be vigilant and keep a close eye on their bank and payment card statements for any unusual activity.
As a precaution, all users are also encouraged to change passwords for their TrueFire account and for any other online account where they use the same credentials.
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Data_Breaches
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Virgin Media Data Leak Exposes Details of 900,000 Customers
|
https://thehackernews.com/2020/03/virgin-media-data-breach.html
|
On the same day yesterday, when the US-based telecom giant T-Mobile admitted a data breach, the UK-based telecommunication provider Virgin Media announced that it has also suffered a data leak incident exposing the personal information of roughly 900,000 customers.
What happened?
Unlike the T-Mobile data breach that involved a sophisticated cyber attack, Virgin Media said the incident was neither a cyber attack nor the company's database was hacked.
Rather the personal details of around 900,000 Virgin Media UK-based customers were exposed after one of its marketing databases was left unsecured on the Internet and accessible to anyone without requiring any authentication.
"The precise situation is that information stored on one of our databases has been accessed without permission. The incident did not occur due to a hack, but as a result of the database being incorrectly configured," the company said in a note published on its website on Thursday night.
According to the notification, Virgin Media said the exposed database was accidentally left unsecured on the Internet from April 19, 2019—that's almost a year—and was recently accessed by an unauthorized party at least once.
What type of information was accessed?
The exposed database stored the information (listed below) on both customers and potential customers, including "fixed-line customers representing approximately 15% of that customer base," said Virgin Media CEO Lutz Schüler.
customer names,
home addresses,
email addresses,
phone numbers,
technical and product information, which includes any requests people may have made using forms on the company's website, and
dates of birth 'in a very small number of cases.'
"Please note that this is all of the types of information in the database, but not all of this information may have related to every customer," Virgin Media said.
The company assured its customers that the misconfigured marketing database did not include affected customers' account passwords or financial information such as credit cards or bank account numbers.
However, Schüler said the company doesn't know "the extent of the access or if any information was actually used."
Who Discovered the Data Leak?
The unguarded database was first discovered online by researchers at TurgenSec, who then responsibly reported it to the Virgin Media's security team as per the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) cybersecurity guidelines.
Though the Virgin Media has surprisingly not publicly acknowledged TurgenSec's findings, the researchers confirmed The Hacker News that the leaked data includes at least 2,324,498 records concerning 900,000 people.
"We cannot speak for the intentions of their communications team but stating to their customers that there was only a breach of "limited contact information" is from our perspective understating the matter potentially to the point of being disingenuous," TurgenSec said in a statement.
According to TurgenSec team, the leaked data also includes affected users':
IP addresses,
Requests to block or unblock various pornographic, gore and gambling websites, corresponding to full names and addresses,
IMEI numbers associated with their stolen phones,
Subscriptions to the different aspects of their services, including premium components,
Device type owned by the user,
The "referrer" header collected from the browsers, exposing which previous site users had visited before accessing Virgin Media.
What is Virgin Media now doing?
The company said the unauthorized access to the database has been shut down immediately following the discovery and that it launched a full independent forensic investigation to determine the extent of the breach incident.
The company is also contacting affected customers of security failure and has already notified the Information Commissioner's Office.
What affected customers should do now?
Affected customers should be suspicious of phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cybercriminals with such data in hands to trick users into giving away further details like their passwords and banking information.
"We urge people to remain cautious before clicking on an unknown link or giving any details to an unverified or unknown party. Online security advice and help on a range of topics are available on our website," Virgin Media said.
Though the compromised data doesn't include any banking or financial data, it is always a good idea to be vigilant and keep a close eye on your bank and payment card statements and report any unusual activity to your respective bank.
For more information regarding the security incident, Virgin Media customers can visit the company's website or call their customer service line on 0345 454 1111.
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Data_Breaches
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A Massive U.S. Property and Demographic Database Exposes 200 Million Records
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/03/us-property-records-database.html
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More than 200 million records containing a wide range of property-related information on US residents were left exposed on a database that was accessible on the web without requiring any password or authentication.
The exposed data — a mix of personal and demographic details — included the name, address, email address, age, gender, ethnicity, employment, credit rating, investment preferences, income, net worth, and property information, such as:
Market value
Property type
Mortgage amount, rate, type, and lender
Refinance amount, rate, type, and lender
Previous owners
Year built
Number of beds and bathrooms
Tax assessment information
According to security firm Comparitech, the database, which was hosted on Google Cloud, is said to have been first indexed by search engine BinaryEdge on 26th January and discovered a day later by cybersecurity researcher Bob Diachenko.
But after failing to identify the database owner, the server was eventually taken offline more than a month later yesterday.
"We've been trying to contact Googles cloud security team (IP with database was hosted on their cloud) for them to take down the IP but never got a response," the research team told The Hacker News. "No other ways to determine the owner were possible because no reverse DNS records were available due to the cloud-based nature of the IP."
In all, the database comprised of 201,162,598 records, with each entry corresponding to a unique individual.
Comparitech noted that during the time it had access to the database, "it was being updated with new data, suggesting that the information contained is fairly recent."
Furthermore, the leak raises questions about the identity of the service that would need to store such detailed personally identifiable and demographic data of this kind.
Spear-phishing Warning
Given that the data was not adequately secured, it's not immediately clear if other unauthorized parties accessed this database and downloaded its content. The consequence of such exposure is the increased possibility of targeted spear-phishing attacks.
"The detailed personal, demographic, and property information contained in this data-set is a gold mine for spammers, scammers, and cybercriminals who run phishing campaigns," Comparitech said. "The data allows criminals not only to target specific people but craft a more convincing message."
Specifically, attackers could target individuals with phishing emails to deliver all kinds of malware that can download malicious programs and steal sensitive information.
It's therefore crucial that users turn on two-factor authentication to add a second layer of account protection.
The incident is not the only time instances of leaky servers have drawn headlines. In recent months, Ecuadorian and Russian citizens, and US government personnel have had their personal info left unprotected on Elasticsearch servers, underscoring that there's still a long way to go when it comes to cloud security.
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Data_Breaches
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Hackers Compromise T-Mobile Employee' Email Accounts and Steal User' Data
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/03/hackers-compromise-t-mobile-employees.html
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If you are a T-Mobile customer, this news may concern you.
US-based telecom giant T-Mobile has suffered yet another data breach incident that recently exposed personal and accounts information of both its employees and customers to unknown hackers.
What happened? In a breach notification posted on its website, T-Mobile today said its cybersecurity team recently discovered a sophisticated cyberattack against the email accounts of some of its employees that resulted in unauthorized access to the sensitive information contained in it, including details for its customers and other employees.
Although the telecom company did not disclose how the breach happened, when it happened, and exactly how many employees and users were affected, it did confirm that the leaked information on its users doesn't contain financial information like credit card and Social Security numbers.
What type of information was accessed? The exposed data of an undisclosed number of affected users include their:
names,
phone numbers,
account numbers,
rate plans and features, and
billing information.
What is T-Mobile now doing? The company took necessary steps to shut down the unauthorized access upon discovery and immediately notified law enforcement of the security breach incident.
T-Mobile also immediately launched a forensic investigation to determine the extent of the breach incident, a report of which is expected to be released soon..
"We regret that this incident occurred. We take the security of your information very seriously, and while we have a number of safeguards in place to protect customer information from unauthorized access, we are also always working to further enhance security so we can stay ahead of this type of activity," the company said.
The company is notifying affected customers of the breach incident.
What should you do now? Though T-Mobile said it does not have any evidence of the stolen information being used to commit fraud or otherwise misused, it still advises users to change PIN/passcode to access their accounts as a precaution.
Affected customers should also be suspicious of phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cybercriminals in an attempt to trick users into giving away their passwords and credit card information.
Although the T-Mobile data breach incident did not expose any financial information of affected customers, it is always a good idea to be vigilant and keep a close eye on your bank and payment card statements for any unusual activity and report to the bank if you find any.
The incident comes in less than six months after the telecom giant suffered a significant data breach that exposed the personal information of some of the customers using its prepaid services.
In August 2018, the company also disclosed a data breach that affected roughly two million customers.
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Data_Breaches
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App Used by Israel's Ruling Party Leaked Personal Data of All 6.5 Million Voters
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/02/Israeli-voter-data-leaked.html
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An election campaigning website operated by Likud―the ruling political party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu―inadvertently exposed personal information of all 6.5 million eligible Israeli voters on the Internet, just three weeks before the country is going to have a legislative election.
In Israel, all political parties receive personal details of voters before the election, which they can't share with any third party and are responsible for protecting the privacy of their citizens and erasing it after the elections are over.
Reportedly, Likud shared the entire voter registry with Feed-b, a software development company, who then uploaded it a website (elector.co.il) designed to promote the voting management app called 'Elector.'
According to Ran Bar-Zik, a web security researcher who disclosed the issue, the voters' data was not leaked using any security vulnerability in the Elector app; instead, the incident occurred due to negligence by the software company who leaked the username and password for the administrative panel through an unprotected API endpoint that was listed in the public source code of its homepage, as shown.
"Someone visiting the Elector website on a standard browser like Google's Chrome could right-click their mouse on the page and select 'View page source.' The revealed source code for the website contained a link to the 'get-admins-users' page, which the prospective hacker simply had to visit in order to find, out in the open, the passwords of "admin" users — those with authorization to manage the database." Israeli media explained.
The exposed database includes the full names, identity card numbers, addresses, and gender of 6,453,254 voters in Israel, as well as the phone numbers, father's name, mother's name, and other personal details of some of them.
Through the affected Elector website is down for many users at the time of writing, some media reports confirm the software company has now patched the issue but can't ensure how many people have since then been able to download the voters' database.
The Israeli Justice Ministry's Privacy Protection Authority (PPA) said it was investigating the incident.
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Data_Breaches
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U.S. Charges 4 Chinese Military Hackers Over Equifax Data Breach
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/02/equifax-chinese-military-hackers.html
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The United States Department of Justice today announced charges against 4 Chinese military hackers who were allegedly behind the Equifax data breach that exposed the personal and financial data of nearly 150 million Americans.
In a joint press conference held today with the Attorney General William Barr and FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich, the DoJ officials labeled the state-sponsored hacking campaign as the largest hacking case ever uncovered of this type.
The four accused, Wu Zhiyong (吴志勇), Wang Qian (王乾), Xu Ke (许可) and Liu Lei (刘磊), have also been indicted for their involvement in hacking and stealing trade secrets, intellectual property and confidential information from several other U.S. businesses in recent years.
In September 2017, credit reporting agency Equifax disclosed it had become a victim of a massive cyberattack that left highly sensitive data of nearly half of the U.S. population in the hands of hackers.
As The Hacker News reported earlier, hackers compromised Equifax servers using a critical vulnerability in Apache Struts Web Framework that the company forgets to patch on time even when an updated secure version of the software was available.
"They used this access to conduct reconnaissance of Equifax's online dispute portal and to obtain login credentials that could be used to further navigate Equifax's network. The defendants spent several weeks running queries to identify Equifax's database structure and searching for sensitive, personally identifiable information within Equifax's system," the DoJ said.
"Once they accessed files of interest, the conspirators then stored the stolen information in temporary output files, compressed and divided the files, and ultimately were able to download and exfiltrate the data from Equifax's network to computers outside the United States. In total, the attackers ran approximately 9,000 queries on Equifax's system, obtaining names, birth dates, and social security numbers for nearly half of all American citizens."
"The defendants took steps to evade detection throughout the intrusion, as alleged in the [nine-count] indictment. They routed traffic through approximately 34 servers located in nearly 20 countries to obfuscate their true location, used encrypted communication channels within Equifax's network to blend in with normal network activity, and deleted compressed files and wiped log files on a daily basis in an effort to eliminate records of their activity."
As a result of the breach, the credit monitoring company Equifax was fined £500,000 by the U.K.'s privacy watchdog for failing to take appropriate steps to protect its customers and also agreed to pay up to $700 million in fines to settle a series of state and federal investigations in the United States.
The DoJ officials said the FBI started this investigation two years ago with only 40 IP addresses that were involved in the attacks that lead the agency to these four members of the People's Liberation Army's 54th Research Institute.
All four indicted suspects are still at large, residing in China and have been added to the FBI's Most Wanted Cyber list.
This is not the first time when the U.S. has charged Chinese intelligence officers over hacking and cyber espionage. In 2014, similar charges were announced against five Chinese military officials for hacking and cyber espionage against several American companies.
Besides this, the U.S has also charged the other two Chinese hackers in 2015 for a massive data breach where hackers stole the personal information of over 80 million customers of the Anthem health insurance company.
This story is developing and will be updated shortly as details become available. Stay tuned with The Hacker News on Twitter for quick updates.
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Data_Breaches
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Wawa Breach: Hackers Put 30 Million Stolen Payment Card Details for Sale
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/01/wawa-credit-card-breach.html
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Remember the recent payment card breach at Wawa convenience stores?
If you're among those millions of customers who shopped at any of 850 Wawa stores last year but haven't yet hotlisted your cards, it's high time to take immediate action.
That's because hackers have finally put up payment card details of more than 30 million Wawa breach victims on sale at Joker's Stash, one of the largest dark web marketplaces where cybercriminals buy and sell stolen payment card data.
As The Hacker News reported last month, on 10th December Wawa learned that its point-of-sale servers had malware installed since March 2019, which stole payment details of its customers from potentially all Wawa locations.
At that time, the company said it's not aware of how many customers may have been affected in the nine-month-long breach or of any unauthorized use of payment card information as a result of the incident.
Now it turns out that the Wawa breach marked itself in the list of largest credit card breaches ever happened in the history of the United States, potentially exposing 30 million sets of payment records.
According to threat intelligence firm Gemini Advisory, on 27th January 2020, hackers started uploading stolen payment card data from Wawa at Joker's Stash marketplace, titled as 'BIGBADABOOM-III,' which reportedly includes card numbers, expiration dates, and cardholder names.
"While the majority of those records were from US banks and were linked to US-based cardholders, some records also linked to cardholders from Latin America, Europe, and several Asian countries," Gemini Advisory said.
"Non-US-based cardholders likely fell victim to this breach when traveling to the United States and transacting with Wawa gas stations during the period of exposure."
"The median price of US-issued records from this breach is currently $17, with some of the international records priced as high as $210 per card."
In the latest statement released yesterday, Wawa confirmed that the company is aware of reports of criminal attempts to sell customers' payment card data and to help further protect its customers, the company has 'alerted payment card processors, payment card brands and card issuers to heighten fraud monitoring activities.'
"We continue to encourage our customers to remain vigilant in reviewing charges on their payment card statements and to promptly report any unauthorized use to the bank or financial institution that issued their payment card by calling the number on the back of the card," Wawa said.
Customers who bought anything from any of the Wawa convenience stores between March and December last year are advised to block the affected cards and request a new one from your respective financial institution.
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Data_Breaches
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250 Million Microsoft Customer Support Records Exposed Online
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/01/microsoft-customer-support.html
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If you have ever contacted Microsoft for support in the past 14 years, your technical query, along with some personally identifiable information might have been compromised.
Microsoft today admitted a security incident that exposed nearly 250 million "Customer Service and Support" (CSS) records on the Internet due to a misconfigured server containing logs of conversations between its support team and customers.
According to Bob Diachenko, a cybersecurity researcher who spotted the unprotected database and reported to Microsoft, the logs contained records spanning from 2005 right through to December 2019.
In a blog post, Microsoft confirmed that due to misconfigured security rules added to the server in question on December 5, 2019, enabled exposure of the data, which remained the same until engineers remediated the configuration on December 31, 2019.
Microsoft also said that the database was redacted using automated tools to remove the personally identifiable information of most customers, except in some scenarios where the information was not the standard format.
"Our investigation confirmed that the vast majority of records were cleared of personal information in accordance with our standard practices," Microsoft said.
However, according to Diachenko, many records in the leaked database contained readable data on customers, including their:
email addresses,
IP addresses,
Locations,
Descriptions of CSS claims and cases,
Microsoft support agent emails,
Case numbers, resolutions, and remarks,
Internal notes marked as "confidential."
"This issue was specific to an internal database used for support case analytics and does not represent an exposure of our commercial cloud services," Microsoft said.
By having real sensitive case information and email addresses of affected customers in hand, the leaked data could be abused by tech-support scammers to trick users into paying for non-existent computer problems by impersonating Microsoft support representatives.
"The absence of Personally Identifiable Information in the dump is irrelevant here, given that technical support logs frequently expose VIP clients, their internal systems and network configurations, and even passwords. The data is a gold mine for patient criminals aiming to breach large organizations and governments," COO of ImmuniWeb Ekaterina Khrustaleva told The Hacker News.
"Worse, many large companies and not only Microsoft have lost visibility of their external attack surface, exposing their clients and partners to significant risks. We will likely see a multitude of similar incidents in 2020."
KnowBe4's Data-Driven Defense Evangelist Roger Grimes also shared his comment and experience with The Hacker News, saying:
"Having worked for Microsoft for 15 years, 11 years as a full-time employee, I've seen firsthand how much they try to fight scenarios like this. There are multiple layers of controls and education designed to stop it from happening. And it shows you how hard it is to prevent it 100% of the time. Nothing is perfect. Mistakes and leaks happen. Every organization has overly permissive permissions. Every! It's just a matter of if someone outside the organization discovers it or if someone takes advantage of it."
"In this case, as bad as it is, it was discovered by someone who didn't do malicious things with it. Sure, the data, sitting unprotected, could have also been used by the bad guys, but so far, no one has made that case or provided evidence that it has been used maliciously," Grimes added.
"Anyone can have a mistake. The most important question is how the mistake happened and how to prevent it from happening next time, and if any others could have happened from the same set of circumstances."
As a result of this incident, the company said it began notifying impacted customers whose data was present in the exposed Customer Service and Support database.
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Data_Breaches
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Download: The State of Security Breach Protection 2020 Survey Results
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/01/data-breach-protection-survey.html
|
What are the key considerations security decision-makers should take into account when designing their 2020 breach protection?
To answer this, we polled 1,536 cybersecurity professionals in The State of Breach Protection 2020 survey (Download the full survey here) to understand the common practices, prioritization, and preferences of the organization today in protecting themselves from breaches.
Security executives face significant challenges when confronting the evolving threat landscape.
For example:
What type of attacks pose the greatest risk, and what security products would best address them?
Is it better to build a strong team in-house, outsource the entire security operation, or search for a sweet spot between the two?
What type and level of automation should be introduced into the breach protection workflows?
The State of Breach Protection 2020 survey provides insights into these questions and others.
Here are a few of the insights the survey unveils:
1) Lack of consolidation is a protection inhibitor — Organizations that currently deploy advanced security products report that maintaining a multi-product security stack (especially in advanced security product groups) is the main obstacle in reaching the desired protection.
2) Most organizations are prioritizing advanced protection projects in 2020 — The majority of organizations that currently deploy a basic security stack of AV, firewall, and email protection plan to add EDR/EPP, Network Traffic Analysis, or SIEM and are planning to do so in 2020.
3) Deployment is the Achilles heel of endpoint protection — Only a small portion of organizations reported on deploying EDR/EPP on more than 85% of their endpoints with no deployment or maintenance issues. Because in many cases, EPP/EDR is regarded as the main mean against advanced attacks, this is an alarming figure.
4) Advanced threat protection still involves a high volume of attended alerts — All organizations that deploy SIEM, EDR/EPP, Network Traffic Analysis, UEBA, or Deception products state that over 25% percent of alerts are left unattended on a daily basis.
5) Response orchestration beats automation — While a significant number of the organizations we polled orchestrate their IR operations from a centralized interface, only a small portion introduce automation to their remediation workflows.
6) Organizations have mixed feelings regarding security outsourcing — While the security skills gap compels organizations to outsource the more advanced portion of their security operations, there is still a strong inclination to keep things in-house, especially in regard to active attack remediation in their environment.
The State of Breach Protection 2020 survey crowdsources the wisdom of numerous security professionals and decision-makers, enabling CISOs to make better informed and data-driven decisions, by zooming out to see the wide perspective of breach protection's best practices and major trends.
Download The State of Breach Protection 2020 survey report here.
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Data_Breaches
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Landry's Restaurant Chain Suffers Payment Card Theft Via PoS Malware
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https://thehackernews.com/2020/01/landry-pos-malware-attack.html
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Landry's, a popular restaurant chain in the United States, has announced a malware attack on its point of sale (POS) systems that allowed cybercriminals to steal customers' payment card information.
Landry's owns and operates more than 600 bars, restaurants, hotels, casinos, food and beverage outlets with over 60 different brands such as Landry's Seafood, Chart House, Saltgrass Steak House, Claim Jumper, Morton's The Steakhouse, Mastro's Restaurants, and Rainforest Cafe.
According to the breach notification published this week, the malware was designed to search for and likely steal sensitive customer credit card data, including credit card numbers, expiration dates, verification codes and, in some cases, cardholder names.
The PoS malware infected point-of-sale terminals at all Landry's owned locations, but, fortunately, due to end-to-end encryption technology used by the company, attackers failed to steal payment card data from cards swiped at its restaurants.
However, Landry's outlets also use "order-entry systems with a card reader attached for waitstaff to enter kitchen and bar orders and to swipe Landry's Select Club reward cards," which allowed attackers to successfully steal customers' payment data "in rare circumstances" when waitstaff mistakenly swiped payment cards on them.
The restaurant chain did not speculate how many customers may have been affected, but it is "notifying customers" that "in rare circumstances, appear to have been mistakenly swiped by waitstaff on devices used to enter kitchen and bar orders, which are different devices than the point-of-sale terminals used for payment processing," the breach notification says.
"The malware searched for track data (which sometimes has the cardholder name in addition to card number, expiration date, and internal verification code) read from a payment card after it was swiped on the order-entry systems. In some instances, the malware only identified the part of the magnetic stripe that contained payment card information without the cardholder name."
According to the company, the POS malware was actively scanning their systems between 13th March 2019 and 17th October 2019 for swipe cards; and at some locations, it may have been installed as early as 18th January 2019.
"During the investigation, we removed the malware and implemented enhanced security measures, and we are providing additional training to waitstaff."
So, if you have used your debit or credit card at any of the above listed outlet last year, you are advised to stay vigilant, monitor your payment card statements for any suspicious activity and immediately report it to your bank and local law enforcement, if found.
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Data_Breaches
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Hackers Stole Customers' Payment Card Details From Over 700 Wawa Stores
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/12/wawa-store-hacking.html
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Have you stopped at any Wawa convenience store and used your payment card to buy gas or snacks in the last nine months?
If yes, your credit and debit card details may have been stolen by cybercriminals.
Wawa, the Philadelphia-based gas and convenience store chain, disclosed a data breach incident that may have exposed payment card information of thousands of customers who used their cards at about any of its 850 stores since March 2019.
What happened? According to a press release published on the company's website, on 4th March, attackers managed to install malware on its point-of-sale servers used to process customers' payments.
By the time it was discovered by the Wawa information security team on 10th December, the malware had already infected in-store payment processing systems at "potentially all Wawa locations."
That means attackers were potentially stealing Wawa customers' payment card information until the malware was entirely removed by its servers on 12th December 2019.
The company also said the malware was present on most locations' point-of-sale systems by approximately 22nd April 2019, although some Wawa locations may not have been affected at all.
What has been compromised? The malware stole credit and debit card information, including card numbers, expiration dates, and customer names on the payment cards used at potentially all of its in-store payment terminals and gas pumps between 4th March 2019, and 12th December 2019.
What's not been compromised? According to the company, debit card PINs, credit card CVV2 numbers, other PINs, driver's license information used to verify age-restricted purchases, and other personal information were not affected by this malware.
Wawa also made it clear that the PoS malware never posed a risk to its ATM cash machines, and at the time of the data breach disclosure, the company was not aware of any unauthorized use of any payment card information as a result of this incident.
How Wawa addressed the payment card breach? The company's information security team fully contained the malware within two days of its discovery, and immediately initiated an investigation by engaging a leading external forensics firm to investigate the incident and verify the extent of the breach.
Wawa also informed law enforcement to support their ongoing criminal investigation and notified payment card companies about the incident.
Wawa, which has over 850 convenience retail stores in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Florida, and Washington, DC, is also offering free identity theft protection and credit monitoring at no charge to anyone whose information may have been compromised.
"I apologize deeply to all of you, our friends and neighbors, for this incident," said Wawa President and CEO Chris Gheysens. "You are my top priority and are critically important to all of the nearly 37,000 associates at Wawa. We take this special relationship with you and the protection of your information very seriously."
What affected customers should do now? Customers who bought anything from any of the Wawa convenience stores since March this year are advised to monitor their payment card statements carefully.
In case you find any unauthorized charges, immediately notify the relevant payment card issuer of it and consider placing a fraud alert or security freeze on your credit file at Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.
Also, if possible, you should consider blocking the affected payment card and requesting a new one from your respective financial institution.
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Data_Breaches
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LifeLabs Paid Hackers to Recover Stolen Medical Data of 15 Million Canadians
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/12/lifelabs-data-breach.html
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LifeLabs, the largest provider of healthcare laboratory testing services in Canada, has suffered a massive data breach that exposed the personal and medical information of nearly 15 million Canadians customers.
The company announced the breach in a press release posted on its website, revealing that an unknown attacker unauthorizedly accessed its computer systems last month and stole customers' information, including their:
Names
Addresses
Email addresses
Login information
Passwords, for their LifeLabs account
Dates of birth
Health card numbers
Lab test results
The Toronto-based company discovered the data breach at the end of October, but the press release does not say anything about the identity of the attacker(s) and how they managed to infiltrate its systems.
However, LifeLabs admitted it paid an undisclosed amount of ransom to the hackers to retrieve the stolen data, which indicates that the attack might have been carried out using a ransomware style malware with data exfiltration abilities.
"Retrieving the data by making a payment. We did this in collaboration with experts familiar with cyber-attacks and negotiations with cybercriminals," the company said while announcing several measures it took to protect its customers' information.
LifeLabs also said the majority of affected customers, who used its labs for diagnostic, naturopathic, and genetic tests, reside in British Columbia and Ontario, with relatively few customers in other locations.
"In the case of lab test results, our investigations to date of these systems indicate that there are 85,000 impacted customers from 2016 or earlier located in Ontario; we will be working to notify these customers directly," the press release read.
"Our investigation to date indicates any instance of health care information was from 2016 or earlier."
LifeLabs said it immediately involved "world-class cybersecurity experts" to isolate and secure the affected computer systems and determine the scope of the cyber attack.
The company also stated that it had already notified law enforcement, privacy commissioners, and government partners to investigate the breach incident.
While LifeLabs has taken several steps to fix the system issues related to the cyber attack and strengthen its cyber defenses by placing additional safeguards to protect your information, it is also offering one free year of identity theft insurance.
"Any customer who is concerned about this incident can receive one free year of protection that includes dark web monitoring and identity theft insurance," LifeLabs said.
Since the exposed data includes users' account login information, affected users are strongly advised to change their passwords on the company's website as well as on any other where they have reused the same password.
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Data_Breaches
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The 2020 State of Breach Protection Survey – Call for Participation
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/12/breach-protection-survey.html
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2010-2019 decade will be remembered as the time in which cybersecurity became acknowledged as a critical concern for all organizations.
With rapidly growing security needs and respective budgets, it is now more essential than ever for security decision-makers to zoom out of the 'products' mindset and assess their security stack in light of the overall breach protection value that their investments return.
The 2020 State of Breach Protection Survey (click here to participate) attempts to map out for the first time how breach protection is practiced and maintained globally – what are the common products, services, concerns, and challenges that are most common amongst organizations.
Any security professional filling the anonymous salary survey questionnaire, organised by The Hacker News in partnership with Cynet, will get a free copy of the survey report once it is released in January 2020. You can complete the questionnaire here.
Why is that important? Because unlike 'endpoint protection,' or 'next-generation firewall,' breach protection is not a strictly defined category and most chances are that – again, unlike these previous two examples – there is no budget in your organization that's designated for 'breach protection,' even while this is the ultimate goal of all your cybersecurity investments.
Changing from security products to breach-protection oriented mindset is essential to break away from the comfort zone of the known and currently practiced security in an organization, pushing you to ask the really hard questions continuously.
The hard questions are not whether the SIEM operates adequately or whether the EPP was successfully deployed across all endpoints in your environment, but rather – is my environment truly secured despite the products, workforce, and service providers I engage? And if not, what can I do about it?
And the best place to start is to get firm and fact-based insights into what others are doing. We all face the same attacks and need to confront them within a pool of available resources. That makes crowd-sourcing this knowledge an extremely powerful tool.
Going straight to the point – what's in it for you by filling the survey? For the most part, you will be benchmarking your variation of breach protection with a comparison set which is far wider than your standard cycles. Let's assume that your interpretation of breach protection includes, for example, EDR on your endpoints, CASB for your SaaS apps with both streaming alerts to a cloud-based SIEM, and engaging a 3rd party MSSP for incident response and investigation.
Is that a common model? If not, what is and how might it impact your onward decision making? Gaining robust knowledge on how your role and industry peers handle challenges similar to yours can provide you with new perspectives.
From a different angle – what do you perceive as your greatest challenge? Is it recruiting a skilled security team? Or perhaps capturing the management mindset to approve the budgets for all the products and services your environment requires? The best supporting evidence to a budgetary claim is showing how the request is on par with the industry standards.
So it's a win-win. Complete the survey and do a valuable service, both to yourself and to the wider community of security decision-makers.
Participate in the 2020 State of Breach Protection Survey here.
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Data_Breaches
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Magento Marketplace Suffers Data Breach Exposing Users' Account Info
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/11/magento-marketplace-data-breach.html
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If you have ever registered an account with the official Magento marketplace to bought or sold any extension, plugin, or e-commerce website theme, you must change your password immediately.
Adobe—the company owning Magento e-commerce platform—today disclosed a new data breach incident that exposed account information of Magento marketplace users to an unknown group of hackers or individuals.
According to the company, the hacker exploited an undisclosed vulnerability in its marketplace website that allowed him to gain unauthorized third-party access to the database of registered users — both customers (buyers) as well as the developers (sellers).
The leaked database includes affected users' names, email addresses, MageID, billing and shipping address information, and some limited commercial information.
While Adobe didn't reveal or might don't know when the Magento marketplace was compromised, the company did confirm that its security team discovered the breach last week on November 21.
Image courtesy: Twitter user @Hxzeroone
Besides this, the company also assured that the hackers were not able to compromise Magento's core product and services, which suggests that themes and plugins hosted on the Marketplace were not accessed to add any backdoor or malicious code and are safe to download.
"On November 21, we became aware of a vulnerability related to Magento Marketplace. We temporarily took down the Magento Marketplace in order to address the issue. The Marketplace is back online. This issue did not affect the operation of any Magento core products or services," said Jason Woosley, VP of Commerce Product and Platform at Adobe.
While the company also didn't reveal the total number of affected users and developers, it has started notifying the affected customers via email.
Though Adobe hasn't explicitly mentioned that the account passwords were also leaked, users are still recommended to change it, and do the same for any other website where you are using the same password.
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Data_Breaches
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OnePlus Suffers New Data Breach Impacting Its Online Store Customers
|
https://thehackernews.com/2019/11/oneplus-store-data-breach.html
|
Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus has suffered a new data breach exposing personal and order information of an undisclosed number of its customers, likely, as a result of a vulnerability in its online store website.
The breach came to light after OnePlus started informing affected customers via email and published a brief FAQ page to disclose information about the security incident.
According to OnePlus, the company discovered the breach just last week after an unauthorized party accessed order information of its customers, including their names, contact numbers, emails, and shipping addresses.
"Last week while monitoring our systems, our security team discovered that some of our users' order information was accessed by an unauthorized party," the company said.
OnePlus also assured that not all customers were affected and that the attackers were not able to access any payment information, passwords, and associated accounts.
"Impacted users may receive spam and phishing emails as a result of this incident."
Though the company did not provide any detail of the vulnerability that attackers exploited to compromise its store, it did inspect the server thoroughly to ensure there aren't any other similar vulnerabilities.
"We took immediate steps to stop the intruder and reinforce security, making sure there are no similar vulnerabilities," OnePlus said. "Right now, we are working with the relevant authorities to further investigate this incident."
As a result of this breach, the company has also finally decided to launch an official bug bounty program by the end of December 2019, allowing researchers and hackers to get paid for responsibly reporting severe vulnerabilities before hackers could do any further damage.
"We are continually upgrading our security program - we are partnering with a world-renowned security platform next month, and will launch an official bug bounty program by the end of December," the company said.
Although the breach does not involve your OnePlus account password, you are still recommended to change the password for your account.
Affected OnePlus customers should also be suspicious of phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cybercriminals in an attempt to trick users into giving away their passwords and credit card information.
This isn't the first time OnePlus has reported a data breach.
As The Hacker News reported back in January 2018, the company's website was hacked by an unknown attacker to steal credit card information belonging to up to 40,000 OnePlus customers.
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Data_Breaches
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T-Mobile Suffers Data Breach Affecting Prepaid Wireless Customers
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/11/t-mobile-prepaid-data-breach.html
|
Are you a T-Mobile prepaid customer? If yes, you should immediately create or update your associated account PIN/passcode as additional protection.
The US-based telecom giant T-Mobile today disclosed a yet another data breach incident that recently exposed potentially personal information of some of the customers using its prepaid services.
What happened? In a statement posted on its website, T-Mobile said its cybersecurity team discovered a "malicious, unauthorized access" to information associated with an undisclosed number of its prepaid wireless account customers.
However, the company did not disclose precisely how the breach happened, when it happened, and how the attackers unauthorizedly managed to access the private information of the company's prepaid customers.
What type of information was accessed? The stolen data associated with customers' prepaid wireless accounts include their:
names,
phone numbers,
billing addresses (if customers provided this data during account establishment),
account numbers, and
rate plans and features, like whether a customer has added an international calling feature.
"Rate plan and features of your voice calling service are 'customer proprietary network information' ('CPNI') under FCC rules, which require we provide you notice of this incident," T-Mobile said.
What type of information was not compromised? The telecommunication giant confirmed that no financial information, social security numbers, and passwords were compromised as a result of the security breach incident.
What is T-Mobile now doing? The company took necessary steps to shut down the unauthorized access upon discovery and immediately notified law enforcement of the security incident.
The company is also notifying affected customers through email and directing them to a customer support page on T-Mobile's website.
T-Mobile also made it clear that if you don't receive an email notification from the company, it's likely your account was not among those impacted by this incident, but "it is possible you didn't hear from [the company] because [it] doesn't have up-to-date contact information for you."
"We are always working to improve security so we can stay ahead of malicious activity and protect our customers. We have a number of safeguards in place to protect your personal information from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure," T-Mobile said.
What Should You Do Now? Affected customers are recommended to update the PIN/passcode to access their accounts.
Do it even if you are not affected—just to be on the safer side.
Affected customers should also be suspicious of phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cybercriminals in an attempt to trick users into giving away their passwords and credit card information.
Although the T-Mobile data breach incident did not expose any financial information, it is always a good idea to keep a close eye on your bank and payment card statements for any unusual activity and report to the bank if you find any.
The incident comes over a year after T-Mobile suffered a significant data breach that exposed names, email addresses, phone numbers, and account information for about 2 million customers.
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Data_Breaches
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Company Detected Years-Long Breach Only After Hacker Maxed Out Servers' Storage
|
https://thehackernews.com/2019/11/hacking-file-storage.html
|
What could be even worse than getting hacked?
It's the "failure to detect intrusions" that always results in huge losses to the organizations.
Utah-based technology company InfoTrax Systems is the latest example of such a security blunder, as the company was breached more than 20 times from May 2014 until March 2016.
What's ironic is that the company detected the breach only after it received an alert that its servers had reached maximum storage capacity due to a data archive file that the hacker created.
InfoTrax Systems is an American company based in Utah that provides backend operations systems to multi-level marketers, which also includes an extensive amount of sensitive data on their users' compensation, inventory, orders, and accounting.
The breach reportedly occurred in May 2014 when the hacker exploited vulnerabilities in InfoTrax's server and its client's website to gain remote control over its server, allowing him to gain access to sensitive personal information for 1 million consumers.
At the time, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued the company for failing to safeguard the personal information the company maintained on behalf of its clients.
According to the FTC complaint, the hacker remotely accessed the system 17 times over the next 21 months without being detected and then began pulling the personal information of consumers on March 2, 2016.
The stolen information included customers' full names, social security numbers, physical addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, usernames, and passwords for 4100 distributor and admin accounts on the InfoTrax service.
What's even worse? The leaked data also included some customers' payment card information (full or partial credit card and debit card numbers, CVVs, and expiration dates), as well as bank account information, including account and routing numbers.
The company discovered the breach on March 7, 2016, when it began receiving alerts that one of its servers had reached its maximum capacity, which was due to a massive data archive file that the hacker created on its customers.
Surprisingly, the intruder managed to breach the company at least two more times even after InfoTrax Systems became aware of the intrusion.
On March 14, 2016, the hacker harvested over 2300 unique, full payment card numbers—including names, physical addresses, CVVs, and expiration dates—and other billing data newly submitted by distributors during the checkout process.
Then again, on March 29, 2016, the hacker used the user ID and password of a valid InfoTrax distributor account to upload more malicious code to collect newly submitted payment card data from that client's website again.
According to the FTC, InfoTrax Systems failed to "inventory and delete personal information is no longer needed, conduct code review of its software and testing of its network, detect malicious file uploads, adequately segment its network, and implement cybersecurity safeguards to detect unusual activity on its network."
On Tuesday, the FTC published a press release, announcing a proposed settlement, which requires InfoTrax Systems to implement a comprehensive data security program that corrects the failures identified in the complaint.
Besides this, the proposed settlement also requires InfoTrax Systems to obtain third-party assessments of its information security program every two years.
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Data_Breaches
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Hackers Breach ZoneAlarm's Forum Site — Outdated vBulletin to Blame
|
https://thehackernews.com/2019/11/zonealarm-forum-data-breach.html
|
ZoneAlarm, an internet security software company owned by Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point Technologies, has suffered a data breach exposing data of its discussion forum users, the company confirmed The Hacker News.
With nearly 100 million downloads, ZoneAlarm offers antivirus software, firewall, and additional virus protection solutions to home PC users, small businesses, and mobile phones worldwide.
Though neither ZoneAlarm or its parent company Check Point has yet publicly disclosed the security incident, the company quietly sent an alert via email to all affected users over this weekend, The Hacker News learned.
The email-based breach notification advised ZoneAlarm forum users to immediately change their forum account passwords, informing them hackers have unauthorizedly gained access to their names, email addresses, hashed passwords, and date of births.
Moreover, the company has also clarified that the security incident only affects users registered with the "forums.zonealarm.com" domain, which has a small number of subscribers, nearly 4,500.
"This [forum] is a separate website from any other website we have and used only by a small number of subscribers who registered to this specific forum," the email notification reads.
"The website became inactive in order to fix the problem and will resume as soon as it is fixed. You will be requested to reset your password once joining the forum."
Hackers Exploited Recent vBulletin 0-Day Flaw
Upon reaching out to the company, a spokesperson confirmed The Hacker News that attackers exploited a known critical RCE vulnerability (CVE-2019-16759) in the vBulletin forum software to compromise ZoneAlarm's website and gain unauthorized access.
For those unaware, this flaw affected vBulletin versions 5.0.0 up to the latest 5.5.4, for which the project maintainers later released patch updates, but only for recent versions 5.5.2, 5.5.3, and 5.5.4.
The Hacker News found that, surprisingly, the security company itself was running an outdated 5.4.4 version of the vBulletin software until last week that let attackers compromise the website easily.
It's the same then-zero-day vBulletin exploit that an anonymous hacker publicly disclosed in late September this year, which, if exploited, could allow remote attackers to take full control over unpatched vBulletin installations.
Moreover, a week after that, the same flaw was also exploited by unknown attackers to hack the Comodo forum website, which exposed login account information of over nearly 245,000 Comodo Forums users.
Though the ZoneAlarm team learned about the breach just late last week and immediately informed affected users, it's unclear exactly when the attackers breached the website.
"ZoneAlarm is conducting an investigation into the matter. We take pride in the fact that we took a proactive approach once this incident was detected and within 24 hours and alerted the forum members," the company's spokesperson told the Hacker News.
Since the ZoneAlarm forum website is down at the time of writing, users would not be able to change their account password on the forum at this moment.
But if you are one of the affected users, you are also recommended to change your passwords for any other online account where you use the same credentials, and do the same for the ZoneForum website as soon as the site goes live again.
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Data_Breaches
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Rogue TrendMicro Employee Sold Customer Data to Tech Support Scammers
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/11/insider-threat-data-breach.html
|
Do you always uncomfortable trusting companies with your data? If so, you're not alone.
While companies do much to protect themselves from external threats, insiders always pose the highest risk to a company's data.
Unfortunately, when we say companies can't eliminate insider threat completely, cybersecurity firms, who are meant to protect others, are not an exception.
Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro has disclosed a security incident this week carried out by an employee who improperly accessed the personal data of thousands of its customers with a "clear criminal intent" and then sold it to a malicious third-party tech support scammers earlier this year.
According to the security company, an estimated number of customers affected by the breach is 68,000, which is less than one percent of the company's 12 million customer base.
Trend Micro first became aware of the incident in early August 2019 when it found that some of its consumer customers were receiving scam calls by criminals impersonating its support employee, which initially led the company to suspect a coordinated attack.
However, a thorough investigation of at least two months into the matter revealed that the incident was not due to an external hack of its systems, rather an insider, who gained access to one of the Trend Micro's customer support databases.
"[It was] the work of a malicious internal source that engaged in a premeditated infiltration scheme to bypass our sophisticated controls," the company said in a blog post published Tuesday.
The stolen database contained Trend Micro consumer customers' names, email addresses, Trend Micro support ticket numbers, and in some instances, phone numbers.
According to the company, the rogue employee did not appear to have stolen any financial or credit card information, and no Trend Micro's business or government customers were affected by the breach.
The investigation also revealed that the rogue employee then sold this information to a "currently unknown" malicious third-party, which resulted in some of its customers receiving scam calls from people impersonating Trend Micro employees.
Though the identity of the rogue employee is still not disclosed, Trend Micro said that it disabled the employee's account and fired the culprit and that it notified law enforcement and is working with them.
As a result, the company is now warning its customers of fake calls, saying that its customer-support staff never calls people "unexpectedly" even if they have purchased its consumer product.
"If a support call is to be made, it will be scheduled in advance," the company said. ". If you receive an unexpected phone call claiming to be from Trend Micro, hang up and report the incident to Trend Micro support using our official contact details."
A separate data breach incident The Hacker News published today also caused due to an insider threat, where two former Twitter employees have been charged with accessing information on thousands of Twitter user accounts on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government.
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Data_Breaches
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Leading Web Domain Name Registrars Disclose Data Breach
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/domain-name-registrars-hacked.html
|
Another day, another massive data breach—this time affecting a leading web technology company, as well as both of its subsidiaries, from where millions of customers around the world have purchased domain names for their websites.
The world's top domain registrars Web.com, Network Solutions, and Register.com disclosed a security breach that may have resulted in the theft of customers' account information.
Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, Web.com is a leading web technology company that owns both Network Solutions and Register.com. The companies offer web services like web hosting, website design, and online marketing to help people build their own websites.
What happened? — In late August 2019, a third-party gained unauthorized access to a "limited number" of the company's computer systems and reportedly accessed millions of records for accounts of current and former customers with Web.com, Network Solutions, and Register.com.
The company said it became aware of the security intrusion only on October 16, 2019, but did not disclose any details on how the incident happened.
What type of information was compromised? — According to the affected domain registrars, the stolen information includes contact details of their customers, such as:
Names
Addresses
Phone numbers
Email addresses
Information about the services offered to a customer.
What type of information was not compromised? — The companies also confirmed that no credit card information was compromised as a result of the security breach incident since they claim to encrypt their customers' credit card numbers before storing them on their databases.
"We store credit card numbers in a PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant encryption standard and do not believe your credit card information is vulnerable as a specific result of this incident," reads a breach notice published on websites of Web.com, Network Solutions, and Register.com.
To be noted, the passwords for account logins of affected customers were also not compromised, which otherwise could have allowed attackers to permanently hijack domain names by transferring them to an account owned by attackers with a separate service.
What are the affected companies now doing? — The companies took necessary steps to stop the security intrusion upon discovery and immediately launched an investigation by engaging a leading independent cybersecurity firm to determine the scope of the incident.
The companies have also notified all the relevant authorities and already started working with federal law enforcement.
All three affected domain registrars are also in the process of contacting affected customers through email and via their websites.
What affected customers should do now? — As a precaution, affected customers are encouraged to change passwords for their Web.com, Network Solutions, and Register.com accounts and for any other online account where you use the same credentials.
Do it even if you are not affected—just to be on the safer side.
"We have already taken additional steps to secure your account, and there is nothing you need to do at this time. The next time you log in to your account, you will be required to reset your password," the domain registrars recommend.
Since the exposed data includes personal identifying information (PII), affected customers should mainly be suspicious of phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cybercriminals in an attempt to trick users into giving away their passwords and credit card information.
Although the data breach did not expose any financial information, it is always a good idea to be vigilant and keep a close eye on your bank and payment card statements for any unusual activity and report to the bank if you find any.
This is not the first time Web.com has disclosed a security incident. In August 2015, the company suffered a major data breach that had compromised personal and credit card information belonging to nearly 93,000 customers.
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Data_Breaches
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Two Hackers Who Extorted Money From Uber and LinkedIn Plead Guilty
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/hackers-extorted-money.html
|
Two grey hat hackers have pleaded guilty to blackmailing Uber, LinkedIn, and other U.S. corporations for money in exchange for promises to delete data of millions of customers they had stolen in late 2016.
In a San Jose courthouse in California on Wednesday, Brandon Charles Glover (26) of Florida and Vasile Mereacre (23) of Toronto admitted they accessed and downloaded confidential corporate databases on Amazon Web Services using stolen credentials.
After downloading the data, the duo contacted affected companies to report security vulnerabilities and demanded money in exchange for the deletion of the data, according to a press release published by the US Justice Department.
"I was able to access backups upon backups, me and my team would like a huge reward for this," the hackers said to the victim company in an email.
"Please keep in mind, we expect a big payment as this was hard work for us, we already helped a big corp which paid close to 7 digits, all went well."
As The Hacker News reported two years ago, the hackers managed to inappropriately accessed and downloaded sensitive information of 57 million Uber riders and drivers, for which Uber reportedly paid the duo $100,000 in bitcoin in an attempt to cover up the breach.
"The defendants used false names to communicate with the victim-corporations, and, on several occasions, informed the victim-corporations that they had been paid by other victim-corporations for identifying security vulnerabilities," the indictment reads.
"They also sent the victim-corporations a sample of the data in order for the victim-corporations to verify the authenticity of data."
The indictment also revealed that the duo blackmailed LinkedIn in the same way in December 2016, informing the company that they had compromised databases of LinkedIn's subsidiary Lynda.com and stole over 90,000 user records, including their credit card information.
At that time, it was also reported that Uber sent its forensic team to the hackers' house in Florida and Canada to analyze their computers to make sure all the stolen data had been wiped and had the hackers also sign a non-disclosure agreement to prevent further wrongdoings.
Uber waited a year to reveal the October 2016 data breach, for which it was later ordered by the attorneys general of all 50 states and the District of Columbia to pay $148 million across all 50 states and Washington DC to settle the investigation.
British and Dutch data protection regulators also hit the ride-sharing company with a total fine of approximately $ 1.1 million for failing to protect its customers' personal information during a 2016 cyber attack.
At the time, it was also reported that Uber hid the data breach incident from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which was investigating another hacking incident against the company, and only told the commission about the 2016 breach in late 2017 when the incident was made public.
Glover and Mereacre each pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy to commit extortion and are set to face a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 when they are sentenced.
The duo has been released on bond and will be sentenced in March 2020.
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Data_Breaches
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5 Places Where Hackers Are Stealthily Stealing Your Data In 2019
|
https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/hacking-data-breach-protection.html
|
Skyrocketing data breaches bring incalculable losses to organizations and can cost cybersecurity executives their jobs.
Here we examine the top five places in 2019 where cybercriminals are stealing corporate and government data without ever getting noticed and then learn how to avoid falling victim to unscrupulous attackers.
1. Misconfigured Cloud Storage
48% of all corporate data is stored in the cloud compared to 35% three years ago, according to a 2019 Global Cloud Security Study by cybersecurity company Thales that surveyed over 3,000 professionals across the globe. Contrastingly, only 32% of the organizations believe that protecting data in the cloud is their own responsibility, counting on cloud and IaaS providers to safeguard the data. Worse, 51% of the organizations do not use encryption or tokenization in the cloud.
(ISC)² Cloud Security Report 2019 assets that 64% of cybersecurity professionals perceive data loss and leakage as the biggest risk associated with the cloud. Misuse of employee credentials and improper access controls are the top challenges for 42% of security professionals, while 34% struggle with compliance in the cloud, and 33% name lack of visibility into infrastructure security as their predominant concern.
Negligent and careless third-parties are, however, probably the most hazardous pitfall that remains largely underestimated and thus disregarded. In 2019, Facebook, Microsoft, and Toyota were mercilessly stigmatized by the media for losing millions of customer records due to third-party leaks or breaches.
Despite these alarming incidents, still few organizations have a well-thought, properly implemented, and continuously enforced third-party risk management program, most relying on paper-based questioners skipping practical verifications and continuous monitoring.
How to mitigate: train your team, implement an organization-wide cloud security policy, continuously run discovery of public cloud storage to maintain an up2date inventory of your cloud infrastructure.
2. Dark Web
Notorious Collection #1, revealed in 2019 by security expert Troy Hunt, is a set of email addresses and plaintext passwords totaling 2,692,818,238 rows. Anyone can anonymously purchase this data for Bitcoins without leaving a trace. Being one of the largest publicly known databases of stolen credentials, it is a mere slice of compromised data available for sale on Dark Web. Many organizations are hacked every day without being aware of this due to the complexity of the attacks or simple negligence, lack of resources or skills.
Targeted password re-use attacks and spear phishing are simple to launch and do not require expensive 0day exploits. Although trivial at first glance, they may be piercingly efficient. Most organizations do not have a consistent password policy across their corporate resources, deploying SSO only to their central infrastructure.
Secondary and auxiliary systems live their own lives, commonly with a poor or even missing password policy but with access to trade secrets and intellectual property. Given the multitude of such portals and resources, attackers meticulously try stolen credentials and eventually get what they seek.
Importantly, such attacks are often technically undetectable due to insufficient monitoring or simply because they do not trigger usual anomalies just letting users in. Experienced hacking groups will carefully profile their victims before the attack to login from the same ISP sub-network and during the same hours outsmarting even the AI-enabled IDS systems underpinned by shrewd security analysts.
How to mitigate: ensure digital assets visibility, implement holistic password policy and incident response plan, continuously monitor Dark Web and other resources for leaks and incidents.
3. Abandoned and Unprotected Websites
According to 2019 research by a web security company ImmuniWeb, 97 out of 100 the world's largest banks have vulnerable websites and web applications. A wide spectrum of problems is attributed to uncontrolled usage of Open Source Software, outdated frameworks, and JS libraries, some of which contained exploitable vulnerabilities publicly known since 2011.
The same report revealed that 25% of e-banking applications were not even protected with a Web Application Firewall (WAF). Eventually, 85% of applications failed GDPR compliance tests, 49% did not pass the PCI DSS test.
In spite of the rise of Attack Surface Management (ASM) solutions, the majority of businesses incrementally struggle with the growing complexity and fluctuating intricacy of their external attack surfaces. Web applications dominate the list of abandoned or unknown assets being left by careless or overloaded developers.
Demo and test releases rapidly proliferate across an organization, sporadically being connected to production databases with sensitive data. The next releases rapidly go live, while the previous ones remain in the wild for months. Understaffed security teams routinely have no time to track such rogue applications, relying on the security policies that half of the software engineers have never read.
Even properly deployed web applications may be a time bomb if left unattended. Both Open Source and proprietary software make a buzz in Bugtraq with remarkable frequency bringing new and predominately easily-exploitable security flaws. With some exceptions, vendors are sluggish to release security patches compared to the speed of mass-hacking campaigns.
Most popular CMS, such as WordPress or Drupal, are comparatively safe in their default installations, but the myriad of third-party plugins, themes, and extensions annihilate their security.
How to mitigate: start with a free website security test for all your external-facing websites and continue with in-depth web penetration testing for the most critical web application and APIs.
4. Mobile Applications' Backends
Modern businesses now generously invest in mobile application security, leveraging secure coding standards built into DevSecOps, SAST/DAST/IAST testing, and RASP protection enhanced with Vulnerability Correlation solutions. Sadly, most of these solutions tackle only the visible tip of the iceberg, leaving mobile application backend untested and unprotected.
While most of the APIs used by the mobile application send or receive sensitive data, including confidential information, their privacy and security are widely forgotten or deprioritized, leading to unpardonable consequences.
Likewise, large organizations commonly forget that previous versions of their mobile apps can be easily downloaded from the Internet and reverse-engineered. Such legacy applications are a true Klondike for hackers searching for abandoned and vulnerable APIs commonly still capable of providing access to an organization's crown jewels in an uncontrolled manner.
Eventually, a great wealth of attacks become possible, from primitive but highly efficient brute-forcing to sophisticated authentication and authorization bypasses used for data scraping and theft. Usually, the most dangerous attacks, including SQL injections and RCEs, reside on the mobile backend side. Being unprotected even by a WAF, they are low-hanging fruit for pragmatic attackers.
How to mitigate: build holistic API inventory, implement software testing policy, run a free mobile app security test on all your mobile apps and backends, conduct mobile penetration testing for critical ones.
5. Public Code Repositories
Agile CI/CD practices are a great business enabler; however, if inadequately implemented, they swiftly morph into a disaster. Within this context, public code repositories are often the weakest link undermining organizational cybersecurity efforts.
A recent example comes from the banking giant Scotiabank that reportedly stored highly sensitive data in publicly open and accessible GitHub repositories, exposing its internal source code, login credentials, and confidential access keys.
Third-party software developers considerably exacerbate the situation in an attempt to provide the most competitive quote to unwitting and somewhat naïve customers. Cheap software is obviously not without substantial drawbacks, and poor security tops them.
While few organizations manage to keep control over the software code quality and security by conducting automated scanning and a manual code review, virtually none are capable of monitoring how the source code is being stored and protected while the software is being developed and especially afterward.
Human mistakes unsurprisingly predominate the space. Even exemplary organizations with mature and prof-tested security policies awkwardly slip because of human factors. Tough deadlines dictated by economic realities lead to overburdened and exhausted programmers who innocently forget to set a proper attribute on a newly created repository letting the troubles in.
How to mitigate: implement a policy addressing code storage and access management, enforce it internally and for third-parties, continuously run public code repositories monitoring for leaks.
Following this mitigation advice may save you countless sleepless nights and many millions for your organization. And lastly, do share information about Attack Surface Management (ASM) with your industry peers to enhance their security awareness and cybersecurity resilience.
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Data_Breaches
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UniCredit Bank Suffers 'Data Incident' Exposing 3 Million Italian Customer Records
|
https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/unicredit-bank-data-breach.html
|
UniCredit, an Italian global banking and financial services company, announced today that it suffered a security incident that leaked some personal information belonging to at least 3 million of its domestic customers.
Officially founded in 1870, UniCredit is Italy's biggest banking and financial services and one of the leading European commercial banks with more than 8,500 branches across 17 countries.
What happened? — Though UniCredit did not disclose any details on how the data incident happened, the bank did confirm that an unknown attacker has compromised a file created in 2015 containing three million records relating only to its Italian customers.
What type of information was compromised? — The leaked data contains personal information of 3 million customers, including their:
Names
Cities
Telephone numbers
Email addresses
What type of information was not compromised? — Unicredit confirmed that the compromised user records did not include any other personal data or bank details that would permit attackers access to customer accounts or allow unauthorized transactions.
What is UniCredit now doing? — The company immediately launched an internal investigation to investigate the incident and verify the extent of the breach, as well as informed all the relevant authorities, including law enforcement.
The company has also begun contacting all potentially affected customers by online banking notifications and/or post.
The bank also said it had placed additional security controls to harden the safety and security of its customers' data.
"Customer data safety and security is UniCredit's top priority, and since the 2016 launch of Transform 2019, the Group has invested an additional 2.4 billion euro in upgrading and strengthening its IT systems and cybersecurity," UniCredit said.
"In June 2019, the Group implemented a new strong identification process for access to its web and mobile services, as well as payment transactions. This new process requires a one-time password or biometric identification, further reinforcing its strong security and client protection."
What affected customers should do now? — Affected customers should mainly be suspicious of phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cyber criminals with personal identifying information (PII) in hands in an attempt to trick users into giving away further details like passwords and banking information.
Though the compromised data doesn't include any banking or financial data, it is always a good idea to be vigilant and keep a close eye on your bank and payment card statements for any unusual activity and report to the bank, if you find any.
This is not the first time when UniCredit has been a victim of such a data security incident. In 2017, the bank disclosed two similar data breaches—one occurred between September and October 2016 and another between June and July 2017— that affected nearly 400,000 Italian customers.
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Data_Breaches
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Unsecured Adobe Server Exposes Data for 7.5 Million Creative Cloud Users
|
https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/adobe-database-leaked.html
|
The U.S. multinational computer software company Adobe has suffered a serious security breach earlier this month that exposed user records' database belonging to the company's popular Creative Cloud service.
With an estimated 15 million subscribers, Adobe Creative Cloud or Adobe CC is a subscription service that gives users access to the company's full suite of popular creative software for desktop and mobile, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, InDesign, Lightroom, and many more.
What happened? — Earlier this month, security researcher Bob Diachenko collaborated with the cybersecurity firm Comparitech to uncover an unsecured Elasticsearch database belonging to Adobe Creative Cloud subscription service that was accessible to anyone without any password or authentication.
How many victims? — The inadvertently exposed database, which has now been secured, contained personal information of nearly 7.5 million Adobe Creative Cloud user accounts.
What type of information was exposed? — The exposed information included Creative Cloud users':
Email addresses
Account creation date
The Adobe products they subscribed to
Subscription status
Payment status
Member IDs
Country
Time since the last login
Is the user an Adobe employee
What might attackers have achieved? — Since the misconfigured cloud database did not include any password or financial information such as credit card numbers, the exposed data is severe enough to expose Adobe CC users to highly targeted and convincing phishing attacks.
"The information exposed in this leak could be used against Adobe Creative Cloud users in targeted phishing emails and scams," Comparitech said in a blog post. "Fraudsters could pose as Adobe or a related company and trick users into giving up further info, such as passwords, for example."
How Adobe addressed the security breach? — Diachenko discovered the exposed database and immediately notified Adobe on October 19.
The company responded to the security incident swiftly and shut off public access to the database on the same day, according to a blog post published by Adobe on Friday.
"Late last week, Adobe became aware of a vulnerability related to work on one of our prototype environments. We promptly shut down the misconfigured environment, addressing the vulnerability," Adobe said.
"This issue was not connected to, nor did it affect, the operation of any Adobe core products or services. We are reviewing our development processes to help prevent a similar issue occurring in the future."
However, it's still unclear how long the database containing records of 7.5 million Adobe Creative Cloud users was exposed before the researcher discovered it.
What users should do? — It's unknown if the database had been unauthorizedly accessed by anyone else before the researcher discovered it, but in case they discovered it, users should mainly be suspicious of phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cyber criminals in an attempt to trick users into giving up further details like passwords and financial information.
Though the database did not expose any financial information, it is always a good idea to be vigilant and keep a close eye on your bank and payment card statements for any unusual activity and report to the bank, if find any.
Adobe also offers two-factor authentication that users should enable to help them secure their accounts with an additional layer of security.
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Data_Breaches
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How to Avoid the Top Three Causes of Data Breaches in 2019
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/data-breach-protection.html
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What's the price of unprotected IT infrastructure? Cybercrime Magazine says that global damages will surpass $6 billion as soon as 2021.
Here we'll go through some of the most frequent and emerging causes of data breaches in 2019 and see how to address them in a timely manner.
Misconfigured Cloud Storage
It's hard to find a day without a security incident involving unprotected AWS S3 storage, Elasticsearch, or MongoDB. A global study from Thales and the Ponemon Institute states that only 32% of organizations believe protecting their data in a cloud is their own responsibility. Worse, according to the same report, 51% of the organizations still do not use encryption or tokenization to protect sensitive data in the cloud.
McAfee confirms, claiming that 99% of cloud and IaaS misconfigurations fall into the realm of end users' control and remain unnoticed. Marco Rottigni, Chief Technical Security Officer EMEA at Qualys, explains the problem: "Some of the most common cloud database implementations ships with no security or access control as standard at the start. They have to be added on deliberately, which can be easily missed."
With a global average cost of $3.92 million per data breach in 2019, these findings are quite alarming. Sadly, many cybersecurity and IT professionals still candidly believe that cloud providers are responsible for protecting their data in the cloud. Unfortunately, most of their assumptions are not in accord with harsh legal reality.
Virtually all major cloud and IaaS providers have experienced law firms to draft an airtight contract you won't be able to alter or negate in a court. Black ink clauses expressly shift financial liability for most incidents on the clients' shoulders and establish limited liability for everything else, often reckoned in pennies.
Most SME companies don't even carefully read the terms, while in large organizations, they are reviewed by legal advisors who are often disconnected from the IT team. Though, one will hardly negotiate better conditions, as otherwise, cloud business will become so perilous and unprofitable that it will swiftly disappear. This means that you will be the sole entity to blame and punish for misconfigured or abandoned cloud storage and a resultant data breach.
Unprotected Code Repositories
Research by North Carolina State University (NCSU) found that over 100,000 GitHub repositories have been leaking secret API tokens and cryptographic keys, with thousands of new repositories exposing secrets on a daily basis. Canadian banking giant Scotiabank recently made news headlines by reportedly storing internal source code, login credentials, and access keys for months in publicly open and accessible GitHub repositories.
Third-parties, especially external software developers, are commonly the weakest link. Often their developers lack proper training and security awareness requisite to duly safeguard their code. Having several projects at once, tough deadlines, and impatient clients, they ignore or forget about the very fundamentals of security, letting their code in public domain.
Cybercriminals are well aware of this digital Ali Baba's cave. Cyber gangs specialized in OSINT data discovery meticulously crawl existing and new code repositories in a continuous mode, carefully scrapping the data. Once something of value is found, it's sold to cyber gangs focused on exploitation and offensive operations to get in.
Given that such intrusions rarely trigger any red flags in anomaly detection systems, they remain unnoticed or detected once it is already too late. Worse, the investigation of such intrusions is costly and almost perspectiveless. Many famous APT attacks involved password re-use attacks with credentials found in code repositories.
Vulnerable Open Source Software
The rapid proliferation of Open Source Software (OSS) in enterprise systems exacerbates the cyber-threat landscape by adding even more unknowns into the game. A recent report by ImmuniWeb found that 97 out of 100 largest banks are vulnerable and have poorly coded web and mobile apps, being riddled with outdated and vulnerable open source components, libraries, and frameworks. The oldest unpatched vulnerability found was known and publicly disclosed since 2011.
OSS does save a lot of time for developers and money for organizations but likewise provides a wide spectrum of concomitant and largely underestimated risks. Few organizations properly track and maintain an inventory of countless OSS and its components built into their enterprise software. Consequently, blinded with unknowingness, they fall victim to unknown unknowns when newly detected OSS security flaws are aggressively exploited in the wild.
Today, medium and large-sized organizations incrementally invest in application security, notably in the implementation of DevSecOps and Shift Left testing. Gartner urges the adoption of Shift Left software testing by incorporating security testing at the early stages of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) before it becomes overly expensive and time-consuming to fix vulnerabilities. However, a holistic and up2date inventory of your OSS is indispensable to implement Shift Left testing; otherwise, you will just pour your money down the drain.
How to Prevent and Remediate
Follow these five recommendations to reduce your risks in a cost-efficient manner:
1. Maintain an up2date and holistic inventory of your digital assets
Software, hardware, data, users, and licenses should be continuously monitored, classified, and risk-scored. In the era of public cloud, containers, code repositories, file-sharing services, and outsourcing, it's not an easy task, but without it, you may ruin the integrity of your cybersecurity efforts and negate all previous cybersecurity investments. Remember, you cannot protect what you don't see.
2. Monitor your external attack surface and risk exposure
Many organizations spend money on auxiliary or even theoretical risks, ignoring their numerous outdated, abandoned, or simply unknown systems accessible from the Internet. These shadow assets are low-hanging fruit for cybercriminals. Attackers are smart and pragmatic; they won't assault your castle if they can silently get in via a forgotten underground tunnel. Therefore, ascertain that you have an ample and up2date view of your external attacks surface in a continuous manner.
3. Keep your software up2date, implement patch management and automated patching
Most of the successful attacks do not involve the usage of sophisticated and costly 0days but publicly disclosed vulnerabilities often available with a working exploit. Hackers will systematically search for the weakest link in your defense perimeter to get in, and even a tiny outdated JS library may be a windfall to get your crown jewels. Implement, test, and monitor a robust patch management system for all your systems and applications.
4. Prioritize your testing and remediation efforts based on risks and threats
Once you have crystal-clear visibility of your digital assets and a properly implemented patch management strategy, it's time to ensure that everything works as you expected. Deploy continuous security monitoring for all your external assets, conduct in-depth testing, including penetration testing of your business-critical web applications and APIs. Setup monitoring for any anomalies with rapid notifications.
5. Keep an eye on Dark Web and monitor data leaks
Most companies do not realize how many of their corporate accounts, exposed by hacked third-party websites and services, are being sold on the Dark Web. The emerging success of password reuse and brute-force attacks stem from it. Worse, even legitimate websites such as Pastebin often expose a great wealth of leaked, stolen, or lost data accessible to everyone. Continuous monitoring and analysis of these incidents may save millions of dollars and, most importantly, your reputation and goodwill.
Reducing Complexity and Costs
We came across an innovative offering from a Swiss company ImmuniWeb® to tackle these issues in a simple and cost-effective manner. We are truly impressed with its technical capabilities, consolidated approach, and accessible price.
ImmuniWeb Discovery provides you with superior visibility and control over your external attack surface and risk exposure.
Try ImmuniWeb® Discovery for:
Rapid discovery of your external digital assets, including APIs, cloud storage and IoT
Actionable, data-driven security ratings of your applications' Hackability and Attractiveness
Continuous monitoring of public code repositories for unprotected or leaked source code
Continuous monitoring of Dark Web for exposed credentials and other sensitive data
Production-safe Software Composition Analysis of your web and mobile applications
Instant alerts about expiring domain names and SSL certificates
Integration with SIEMs and other security systems via API
We hope you will avoid becoming a victim of a data breach in 2020!
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Data_Breaches
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Comodo Forums Hack Exposes 245,000 Users' Data — Recent vBulletin 0-day Used
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/Comodo-vbulletin-hacked.html
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If you have an account with the Comodo discussion board and support forums, also known as ITarian Forum, you should change your password immediately.
Cybersecurity company Comodo has become one of the major victims of a recently disclosed vBulletin 0-day vulnerability, exposing login account information of over nearly 245,000 users registered with the Comodo Forums websites.
In a brief security notice published earlier today, Comodo admitted the data breach, revealing that an unknown attacker exploited the vBulletin vulnerability (CVE-2019-16759) and potentially gained access to Comodo Forums database.
It's worth noting that Comodo forum was hacked on September 29, almost four days after vBulletin developers released a patch to let administrators address the vulnerability, but the company failed to apply the patches on time.
As The Hacker News broke the news last week, an anonymous hacker publicly disclosed details of a critical then-unpatched vulnerability in vBulletin—one of the widely used internet forum software—which could have allowed remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands on the web server.
However, Comodo has not specified which of the company's forums has been hacked out of the two separate forums it owns.
One the forums, "forums.comodo.com," is hosted at Comodo's own sub-domain and is powered by the different forum software, called Simple Machines Forum, and appears not to be impacted.
The second forum, which runs over the vBulletin software and has likely been hacked, is ITarian Forum hosted at "forum.itarian.com," a discussion board where the company offers technical assistance to the users of its products.
What Type of Information Was Accessed?
The breached database contains forum users' information, including:
Login username
Name
Email address
Hashed passwords
Last IP address used to access the forums
Some social media usernames in very limited situations.
The company became aware of the security breach over the weekend on September 29 morning, which suggests users registered on Comodo Forums until this Sunday are impacted by the breach.
"Very recently a new vulnerability in the vBulletin software, which is one of the most popular server applications for website comments including the Comodo Forums, was made public," the company says.
"Over the weekend at 4:57 am ET on Sunday, September 29, 2019, we became aware that this security flaw in the vBulletin software had become exploited resulting in a potential data breach on the Comodo Forums."
Immediately after detecting the security intrusion, the Comodo IT infrastructure team immediately took the forums offline in an attempt to mitigate the vBulletin exploit and applied the recommended security patches.
What Users Should Do Now?
If you have registered with Comodo Forums on or before September 29, you are highly recommended to immediately change the password for your forum account to a strong and unique one and for any other online account where you use the same credentials.
Although the account passwords were hashed in vBulletin for the Comodo Forum users, Comodo advises users to change their passwords as part of good password practices.
"We deeply regret any inconvenience or distress this vulnerability may have caused you, our users," the company says.
"As members of our community of Comodo Forum users, we want to reassure you that we have put in place measures to ensure that vulnerabilities in third-party software, such as vBulletin, will be patched immediately when patches become available."
Besides this, at the time of writing, the company has also temporarily disabled the registration for new users on the affected forums, The Hacker News confirmed.
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Data_Breaches
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DoorDash Breach Exposes 4.9 Million Users' Personal Data
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/doordash-data-breach.html
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Do you use DoorDash frequently to order your food online?
If yes, you are highly recommended to change your account password right now.
DoorDash—the popular on-demand food-delivery service—today confirmed a massive data breach that affects almost 5 million people using its platform, including its customers, delivery workers, and merchants as well.
DoorDash is a San Francisco-based on-demand food delivery service (just like Zomato and Swiggy in India) that connects people with their local restaurants and get delivered food on their doorsteps with the help of contracted drivers, also known as "Dashers."
The service operates in more than 4,000 cities across the United States and Canada.
What happened?
In a blog post published today, DoorDash said the company became aware of a security intrusion earlier this month after it noticed some "unusual activity" from a third-party service provider.
Immediately after detecting the security intrusion, the company launched an investigation and found that an unauthorized third party managed to gain access to DoorDash personal data and in some cases financial data of its users on 4th May 2019.
Yes, you read that right. The data breach happened on 4th May, but it took the company more than four months to discover the security incident.
Based on the company's statement, it appears that the systems for food delivery service itself don't have any potential weakness that may have exposed its users' data in the first place; instead, the incident involves a third-party service provider.
How many victims?
The breach affected approximately 4.9 million consumers, Dashers, and merchants, who joined DoorDash platform on or before 5th April 2018.
However, the company said that those who joined its platform after 5th April 2018, are not affected by the breach.
What type of information was accessed?
The type of data accessed by the unknown attacker(s) include both personal and financial data, as shown below:
Profile information of all 4.9 million affected users — This data includes their names, email addresses, delivery addresses, order history, phone numbers, and hashed passwords.
Financial information of some consumers — The company said the hackers also managed to get their hands on the last four digits of payment cards for some of its consumers but assured that full payment card numbers or a CVV were not accessed.
Financial information of some Dashers and merchants — Not just consumers, but some Dashers and merchants also had the last four digits of their bank account number accessed by the hackers.
Information of 100,000 Dashers — The attackers were also able to access driver's license numbers for 100,000 Dashers.
However, DoorDash believes this information is not sufficient to place fraudulent orders using payment cards or to make fraudulent withdrawals from bank accounts.
What is DoorDash now doing?
In an attempt to protect its customers, DoorDash immediately restricted further unauthorized access by the attacker and hired security experts to investigate the incident and verify the extent of the breach.
The company also said it had placed additional security controls to harden the security and further secure its customers' data, which include adding additional security layers to protect user data and improving security protocols that allow access to its systems.
DoorDash is also bringing in "outside expertise" to increase the company's ability to identify and repel such threats before it victimizes its users.
"We deeply regret the frustration and inconvenience that this may cause you. Every member of the DoorDash community is important to us, and we want to assure you that we value your security and privacy," the company said.
The company is in the process of reaching out directly to individual users affected by the data breach with more information, which may take a few days. Users can call the company's dedicated call center available 24/7 for support at 855–646–4683.
What Should You Do Now?
First of all, change your passwords for DoorDash account and any other online account where you use the same credentials. Do it even if you are not affected—to be on the safer side.
Though the financial information accessed by the hackers are not enough for making fraudulent withdrawals from bank accounts, its is always a good idea to be vigilant and keep a close eye on your bank and payment card statements for any unusual activity and report to the bank, if find any.
You should also mainly be suspicious of phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cyber criminals after a breach in an attempt to trick users into giving up further details like passwords and bank information.
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Data_Breaches
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IT Firm Manager Arrested in the Biggest Data Breach Case of Ecuador's History
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/ecuador-data-breach.html
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Ecuador officials have arrested the general manager of IT consulting firm Novaestrat after the personal details of almost the entire population of the Republic of Ecuador left exposed online in what seems to be the most significant data breach in the country's history.
Personal records of more than 20 million adults and children, both dead and alive, were found publicly exposed on an unsecured Elasticsearch server by security firm vpnMentor, which made the discovery during its large-scale mapping project.
For a country with a population of over 16 million people, the breach exposed details of almost every Ecuadorian citizen, including President Lenín Moreno as well as WikiLeaks CEO Julian Assange, who was given political asylum in the country in 2012.
The unsecured Elasticsearch server, which was based in Miami and owned by Ecuadorian company Novaestrat, contained 18GB cache of data appeared to have come from a variety of sources including government registries, an automotive association called Aeade, and an Ecuadorian national bank called Biess.
Data Breach Exposes Personal Data of Almost Entire Ecuador Population
The cache reportedly contained everything from full names, gender, dates and places of birth, phone numbers and addresses, to marital statuses, national identification numbers (similar to social security numbers), employment information, and details of education.
The cache also contained specific financial information related information to accounts held with the Ecuadorian national bank Biess, including person's bank account statuses, current balances and credit type, along with detailed information about individuals' family members.
vpnMentor notified the Ecuadorian Computer Incident Response Center (EcuCERT) of the breach, who then immediately informed Novaestrat, the online data consulting firm in the city of Esmeraldas who owned the unsecured server, which was later taken offline on September 11.
Authorities Investigating Company Allegedly Responsible for the Leak
As part of the investigation, Ecuadorian officials also said in a statement on Tuesday that they had arrested the manager of Novaestrat identified as William Roberto G and seized electronic equipment, computers, storage devices, and documentation during a raid at his home.
Roberto has been taken to the Ecuadorian capital, Quito, by the authorities for questioning and may face criminal charges.
Also, given the privacy concerns surrounding the incident, the country's Minister of Telecommunications said legal actions would be taken against the affected institutions to sanction private companies responsible for violating privacy and publicizing personal information without authorization.
The Minister of Telecommunications also said it is planning to pass a new data privacy law in the country, which they have been working for the past eight months, to protect the personal data of its citizens.
This is not the first time when the country has suffered a significant data security breach.
In 2016, hackers managed to steal $12 million from an Ecuadorian bank, Banco del Austro (BDA), by breaching its Swift payment system.
However, the latest Ecuador's breach recalled Bulgaria history's biggest data breach that took place on July 2019 and exposed personal and financial information of 5 million adult Bulgarian citizens out of its total population of 7 million people—that's over 70% of the country's population.
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Data_Breaches
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How Cloud-Based Automation Can Keep Business Operations Secure
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/how-cloud-based-automation-can-keep.html
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The massive data breach at Capital One – America's seventh-largest bank, according to revenue – has challenged many common assumptions about cloud computing for the first time.
Ironically, the incident, which exposed some 106 million Capital One customers' accounts, has only reinforced the belief that the cloud remains the safest way to store sensitive data.
"You have to compare [the cloud] not against 'perfect' but against 'on-premises.'" Ed Amoroso, a former chief security officer at AT&T, told Fortune magazine this week.
He wasn't the only voice defending cloud computing in the wake of a hack attack. In an article titled "Don't Doubt the Cloud," Fortune columnist Robert Hackett, wrote: "The cloud is undeniably convenient and, more importantly, better in terms of security than what the majority of companies can achieve alone."
The problem, experts said, was not cloud computing but rather the tendency for companies to become overly-reliant on cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services to oversee all aspects of security, instead of taking full responsibility for their data security.
Security Advantages of Cloud-Based System
After taking the necessary steps to ensure the safety of their data, companies benefit in numerous ways from the collective security of the cloud.
1. Services such as SaaS (Software as a Service) are hosted on cloud servers
With the collective power of the cloud, the changes are extremely high that the servers hosting your data are better protected than your on-site servers would be. In addition, the cloud service provider handles all maintenance, updates, and support. That takes a great deal of pressure off the IT department.
This is both the biggest benefit of cloud computing and possibly the biggest area of risk. While a service such as Amazon Cloud Services has security resources few companies can match, it must be remembered that placing data in on the cloud is to take it out of complete control by your company. The firewalls protecting the data are no longer your own.
But since your company is still working with the data, it must be secured at a high level on your end. That means compliance with SOC 2 and ISO/27001.
2. Greatly Reduce Human Error – the Single Biggest Threat to Data Safety
With fewer people having access to the data, there are fewer opportunities for errors that lead to data breaches. Too often, hackers can get through the most secure firewalls because someone on the other side carelessly clicked through a link that was planted by a hacker, usually in an email.
But since the data is stored on servers in the cloud, not on-premises, those types of hacks will not result in data breaches.
In addition, adding a layer of automation could reduce the amount of human interaction even more. Start-ups such as PapayaGlobal offer automation in global payroll ears renowned for being the target of hackers, whilst other companies have developed solutions involving robotic process automation (RPA)—software bots that are capable of mimicking human actions.
Those bots are already being employed in areas such as book-keeping. The fewer people interacting with sensitive data, the safer the data will be.
3. Data Transfers Only Through Secure channels
Some of the most common data breaches are carried out through the most mundane methods. Hackers create "spoof" versions of popular email programs.
During tax season, when emails between financial departments and accounting firms are most intense, it's easy to fall for the crafty spoofs and wind up sending data directly to a cybercriminal.
Email is widely recognized as one of the worst ways to send private and sensitive data for a variety of reasons. Not surprisingly, the strict standard for data privacy set by the EU's GDPR forbids transferring private information through email.
With cloud computing, data is sent only through secure, encrypted channels. That eliminates the possibility of spoofs and other common ploys by hackers. It also keeps the data out of sight from hackers, significantly reducing the possibility that they would try to hack your data by other means.
4. Separation between work environment and storage environment
Another great advantage of the cloud is the networking segmentation between computing and storage. The obvious benefit of this separation is the reduced risk that all data will be compromised, even if a hacker manages to breach all the sophisticated defenses.
Other forms of segmentation include limiting the number of people who can access certain data. Keeping sensitive information in the hands of only those individuals who need it, and staggering access so that the smallest possible number of people have access to the whole is an excellent way to mitigate potential breaches.
Avoiding the Next Capital One Breach
Few companies were as committed to the benefits of cloud computing as Capital One. While this did not protect the company from suffering one of the largest data breaches in history, it may help the next company avoid the same fate.
It has brought greater awareness to the field of cloud security and data protection and identified areas that were exploitable by crafty hackers.
The breach did not prove that the cloud was less secure than previously believed. It showed that it is never a good idea to outsource data security entirely to a third party.
Companies need to remain on guard at all times, take measures to ensure their own part of the data equation remains up to date with the most advanced technology, and keep a watchful eye on their data even when it is stored in the safety of the cloud.
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Data_Breaches
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Popular Period Tracking Apps Share Your Sexual Health Data With Facebook
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/facebook-period-tracker-privacy.html
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Hello Ladies, let's talk about periods, privacy, and Facebook.
Are you using an app on your smartphone to keep tracks on your periods?
Well, it's worrying, because it might be sharing your extremely sensitive information like menstrual cycle and sexual activities with Facebook.
A new investigative report from UK-based advocacy group Privacy International revealed how some most popular period tracker apps used by millions of women share their most private health information—including monthly period cycles, contraception use, sexual life, symptoms, like swelling and cramps, and more—directly with Facebook.
These period-tracking apps, listed below, transfer your data to Facebook the moment you open them, regardless of the fact that you have a Facebook account or not, and whether you are logged into the social network platform or not.
Period-tracking apps are used by women to keep tracks on their monthly period cycles, but mostly they are being used by those who want to conceive, as such apps can help them monitor ovulation days when there are more chances of conceiving a child.
For accuracy in calculating the day of the month you're most fertile or the date of your next period, these apps ask you to log some of your most sensitive information into the app, like when you have sex, dates of your periods, physical and emotional symptoms and more—the information you would otherwise not prefer to share with anyone.
These Period Tracking Apps Share Your Data With Facebook
However, Privacy International found that some of the most popular period-tracking apps with millions of downloads on Google Play Store, listed below, share this information directly with Facebook or other third-party services.
The apps share user-entered data with Facebook via its software development kit (SDK) integrated into the app to help app developers, among other functions, earn revenue by collecting user data so Facebook can show them targeted advertisements.
Maya—owned by India-based Plackal Tech and has over 5 million downloads
MIA Fem: Ovulation Calculator—by Cyprus-based Mobapp Development Limited and has over 1 million downloads
My Period Tracker—owned by Linchpin Health and has over 1 million downloads
Ovulation Calculator—owned by PinkBird and has over half a million downloads
Mi Calendario—by Grupo Familia and has more than 1 million downloads
"The wide reach of the apps that our research has looked at might mean that intimate details of the private lives of millions of users across the world are shared with Facebook and other third parties without those users' free unambiguous and informed or explicit consent, in the case of sensitive personal data, such as data relating to a user's health or sex life," the report reads.
Besides sharing users' data with third-party services, some period-tracking apps even ask them if they want to anonymize this data or not, as the report says: "If you have unprotected sex, MIA will tell you what to do. And share it with Facebook and others."
"Confidentiality is at the heart of medical ethics and countries that have data protection laws traditionally have a separate regime for health data, which includes health data, which are considered sensitive data," the researchers said.
"Our research highlights that the apps we have exposed raise serious concerns when it comes to their compliance with their GDPR obligations, especially around consent and transparency."
Facebook and Affected Apps Responded
When contacted, one of the app, called Maya, told PI that the app had "removed both the Facebook core SDK and Analytics SDK from Maya" and released a new version of its app, Version 3.6.7.7, on the Google Play Store that reflect these changes.
Maya also said the app would continue to use the Facebook Ad SDK for users who had agreed to its terms and conditions and privacy policy, but added that it does not "share any personally identifiable data or medical data with the Facebook Ad SDK."
PinkBird, who owns Ovulation Calculator, acknowledged that the app had integrated Facebook advertising SDK to maintain the development of PinkBird team, but said it would "investigate whether the advertising platform collects users' private data or not, and if it collects, we will remove it immediately."
In response to the report, Facebook said its Terms require every app developer to be clear with their users about what information they are gathering and sharing with the social network and have a "lawful basis" for collecting this data.
Facebook also added that it prohibits app developers from sharing customer data that "includes health, financial information, or other categories of sensitive information (including any information defined as sensitive under applicable law)."
The social media giant also said it had got in touch with the period-tracking apps in question about potential violations of Facebook's terms of service.
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Data_Breaches
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CISO Kit — Breach Protection in the Palm of Your Hand
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/data-breach-protection.html
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CISOs and CIOs need to know better than anyone the security pulse of their organizations. On the other hand, they cannot be flooded with every changing detail.
Finding the right balance that enables them to clearly grasp the big picture required in making sound decisions is a task many security executives find challenging. Threat actors do not acknowledge off-hours or weekends, introducing the need for constant vigilance.
Moreover, CIOs and CISOs are heavily dependent on their team for knowledge and often lack the immediate interaction with the events in real-time. This situation is also far from favorable – after all, who if not the security executive should have the ability to be in-the-know and initiate action at the heart of things?
Cynet rises to this challenge with the recently launched Cynet Dashboard application, which provides 24/7 insight into the overall security posture, real-time visibility into newly detected threats, and the ability to take rapid action if the need arises.
Moreover, any new Cynet customer receives a 'CISO Kit' of iPad and Apple Watch that runs this app, giving instant security on-the-go. (For more details, click here.)
"It's a problem every CIO and CISO comes to acknowledge sooner or later," said Eyal Gruner, co-Founder of Cynet. "You want to know at any given moment what's happening. What you have in your environment, whether there is something going on, if there any open incidents, and so on. On the other hand, you cannot spend your entire day in front of Cynet's screen."
"We think it's crucial that every security executive has that immediate visibility, wherever he is, and that's why we've decided to provide our new clients with an Apple Watch and iPad together with the Cynet Dashboard app."
The Need to Know
To address this need, Cynet built the Cynet Dashboard App which continuously gives CISOs a view into the number of assets in their environment, as well as how many open alerts there are at any given moment, rated by severity (low, medium, high or critical) and type (host, file, user or network).
"We've talked to hundreds of security stakeholders from organizations of all sizes, and it all converged into a common theme – they want to know what they have in their environment and what security events are currently taking place. Plain and simple," explained Gruner.
The Need to Report
On top of real-time knowledge into what's going on, the Cynet Dashboard App addresses the need for concise communication and reporting.
Not the fully blown PDFs with graphs and charts, but being able to casually say in a management meeting or over lunch, 'Yes, we had 3 incidents this week. Two were resolved the other day, and one is being handled now.'
The Need to Control
"When we founded Cynet, we knew that providing security expertise is not less important than providing the technology," said Gruner.
"So when prospects purchase Cynet, they also get CyOps – our team of expert security analysts and threat researchers that operate a 24/7 SOC to assist our customers with incident response, in-depth investigation and proactive threat hunting. This is one of the things our customers really love."
The Cynet Dashboard App enables CISOs to engage CyOps with a simple click, complementing the real-time knowledge and reporting with the ability to act and ensure that incidents get expert treatment.
Changing the CISO Experience
"This is the first time such an experience has been made available to cybersecurity management," said Gruner. "Our app enables the CISO to become truly autonomous. Know the core facts that matter, report to management, and take quick action if needed – all through his Apple Watch or iPad. It's all up to him to take control and determine what to do. It's literally having your security in the palm of your hand."
Click here to learn more about the Cynet Dashboard app and how you can get your own Cynet CISO Kit.
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Data_Breaches
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XKCD Forum Hacked – Over 562,000 Users' Account Details Leaked
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/xkcd-forum-hacked.html
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XKCD—one of the most popular webcomic platforms known for its geeky tech humor and other science-laden comic strips on romance, sarcasm, math, and language—has suffered a data breach exposing data of its forum users.
The security breach occurred two months ago, according to security researcher Troy Hunt who alerted the company of the incident, with unknown hackers stealing around 562,000 usernames, email and IP addresses, as well as hashed passwords.
However, the leaked data was actually discovered by security researcher and data analyst Adam Davies, who shared a copy of it with Hunt.
At the time of writing, XKCD has taken down its forum and posted a short notice on its homepage, as shared below, urging its users to change their passwords immediately.
"The xkcd forums are currently offline. We've been alerted that portions of the PHPBB user table from our forums showed up in a leaked data collection. The data includes usernames, email addresses, salted, hashed passwords, and in some cases, an IP address from the time of registration."
"We've taken the forums offline until we can go over them and make sure they're secure. If you're an echochamber.me/xkcd forums user, you should immediately change your password for any other accounts on which you used the same or a similar password."
The forum administrators are also notifying affected users via email.
As mentioned, XKCD uses phpBB, a free and open-source forum and bulletin board software built in the PHP programming software.
However, at this moment it's unclear if XKCD was using an older version of the forum software vulnerable to a security flaw or the attackers exploited any previously undiscovered flaw in phpBB to extract the data unauthorisedly.
Besides this, even if XKCD was running over phpBB version 3.1 and later, which uses more secure BCRYPT hashing algorithm, it's possible that the passwords for early users of the XKCD forum were encrypted via the older, less secure MD5 hashing method.
What you can do now: affected users are strongly advised to immediately change their XKCD password, as well as passwords for any other online accounts which re-use the same password.
Created in 2005 by American author Randall Munroe, XKCD is a popular webcomic that focuses on tech, science, and internet culture, with its subject matter varies from statements on life and love to mathematical, programming, and scientific in-jokes.
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Data_Breaches
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Foxit PDF Software Company Suffers Data Breach—Asks Users to Reset Password
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/foxit-pdf-reader-data-breach.html
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If you have an online account with Foxit Software, you need to reset your account password immediately—as an unknown attacker has compromised your personal data and log-in credentials.
Foxit Software, a company known for its popular lightweight Foxit PDF Reader and PhantomPDF applications being used by over 525 million users, today announced a data breach exposing the personal information of 'My Account' service users.
Though for using free versions of any Foxit PDF software doesn't require users to sign up with an account, the membership is mandatory for customers who want to access "software trial downloads, order histories, product registration information, and troubleshooting and support information."
According to a blog post published today by Foxit, unknown third-parties gained unauthorized access to its data systems recently and accessed its "My Account" registered users' data, including their email addresses, passwords, users' names, phone numbers, company names, and IP addresses.
From the company's statement, it's not clear, if the leaked account passwords are protected with a robust hashing algorithm and salting mechanism to make it tough for hackers to crack them.
However, the company assured its users that no payment card details or other personal identification data of its My Account users had been accessed since the compromised system doesn't hold this data.
Reset Your 'My Account' Password Now!
In response to this security incident, Foxit has immediately invalidated the account passwords for all affected users, requiring them to reset their passwords to regain access to their online account on the Foxit Software website.
The company has also launched a digital forensics investigation as well as notified law enforcement agencies and data protection authorities of the incident.
Besides this, Foxit Software has also hired a security management firm to conduct an in-depth analysis of its systems and strengthen their security in order to protect the company against future cybersecurity incidents.
Following the password reset, the company has also contacted affected users via email (as shown above in the screenshot shared by a user), providing them with a link to create a new, strong and unique password for their accounts to prevent any unauthorized access.
Foxit users have also been recommended to remain vigilant by being cautious of any suspicious emails asking them to click on the links or download attachments, and reviewing their account statements and monitoring their credit reports to avoid identity theft.
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Data_Breaches
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Capital One Hacker Also Accused of Hacking 30 More Companies and CryptoJacking
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/paige-thompson-capital-one.html
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Former Amazon employee Paige Thompson, who was arrested last month in relation to the Capital One data breach, has been accused of hacking not only the U.S. credit card issuer, but also more than 30 other companies.
An indictment unsealed on Wednesday revealed that Thompson not just stole data from misconfigured servers hosted with a cloud-computing company, but also used the computing power of hacked servers to mine for cryptocurrency, a practice commonly known as "Cryptojacking."
Thompson, known online as "erratic," was arrested by the FBI on July 29 concerning a massive breach in Capital One Financial Corp that exposed the personal information of more than 100 million credit card applicants in the United States and 6 million in Canada.
The stolen data included approximately 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers linked to United States customers, and 1 million Social Insurance numbers belonged to Canadian citizens, along with some customers' names, addresses, dates of birth, credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history, and contact information.
Law enforcement became aware of Thompson's activity after she posted information relating to her theft of Capital One data on her GitHub account.
However, a federal grand jury yesterday charged Thompson with a total of two counts—one count of wire fraud and one count of computer fraud and abuse—for illicitly accessing data on more than 30 other entities, including Capital One, U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said.
While the indictment [PDF] did not name the involved cloud-computing company, it's highly likely to be Amazon as Thompson previously worked for Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud computing services to Capital One among others.
But it should also be noted that Amazon Web Services was not compromised in any way since Thompson gained access to the cloud server due to Capital One's misconfiguration and not through a vulnerability in Amazon's infrastructure.
The indictment also did not provide names of the other 30 victims, but it did describe three of the targeted organizations as a state agency outside the State of Washington, a telecommunications conglomerate outside the U.S. and a public research university outside the State of Washington.
Investigators have found no evidence of Thompson selling or disseminating any of the stolen information.
The 33-year-old Seattle-based software engineer remains in custody and is scheduled to be arraigned on the indictment in U.S. District Court in Seattle on September 5. She could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
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Data_Breaches
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Imperva Breach Exposes WAF Customers' Data, Including SSL Certs, API Keys
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/imperva-waf-breach.html
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Imperva, one of the leading cybersecurity startups that helps businesses protect critical data and applications from cyberattacks, has suffered a data breach that has exposed sensitive information for some of its customers, the company revealed today.
The security breach particularly affects customers of Imperva's Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF) product, formerly known as Incapsula, a security-focused CDN service known for its DDoS mitigation and web application security features that protect websites from malicious activities.
In a blog post published today, Imperva CEO Chris Hylen revealed that the company learned about the incident on August 20, 2019, only after someone informed it about the data exposure that "impacts a subset of customers of its Cloud WAF product who had accounts through September 15, 2017."
The exposed data includes email addresses and hashed and salted passwords for all Cloud WAF customers who registered before 15th September 2017, as well as API keys and customer-provided SSL certificates for a subset of users.
"We activated our internal data security response team and protocol, and continue to investigate with the full capacity of our resources how this exposure occurred," the company says.
"We have informed the appropriate global regulatory agencies. We have engaged outside forensic experts."
The company has not yet revealed how the Cloud WAF customers' data got leaked, whether its servers were compromised or if it was accidentally left unsecured in a misconfigured database on the Internet.
However, Imperva is still investigating the incident, and the company has ensured that it is informing all impacted customers directly and is also taking additional measures to scale up its security.
"We profoundly regret that this incident occurred and will continue to share updates going forward. In addition, we will share learnings and new best practices that may come from our investigation and enhanced security measures with the broader industry," the company says.
Cloud WAF users are recommended to change their account passwords, implement Single Sign-On (SSO), enable two-factor authentication (2FA), generate and upload new SSL certificate, and reset their API keys.
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Data_Breaches
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Hostinger Suffers Data Breach – Resets Password For 14 Million Users
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/web-hosting-hostinger-breach.html
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Popular web hosting provider Hostinger has been hit by a massive data breach, as a result of which the company has reset passwords for all customers as a precautionary measure.
In a blog post published on Sunday, Hostinger revealed that "an unauthorized third party" breached one of its servers and gained access to "hashed passwords and other non-financial data" associated with its millions of customers.
The incident occurred on August 23 when unknown hackers found an authorization token on one of the company's servers and used it to gain access to an internal system API, without requiring any username and password.
Immediately after the breach discovery, Hostinger restricted the vulnerable system, making this access no longer available, and contacted the respective authorities.
"On August 23rd, 2019 we have received informational alerts that one of our servers has been accessed by an unauthorized third party," Hostinger said.
"This server contained an authorization token, which was used to obtain further access and escalate privileges to our system RESTful API Server*. This API Server* is used to query the details about our clients and their accounts."
The API database hosts personal information of nearly 14 million Hostinger customers, including their usernames, emails, hashed passwords, first names, and IP addresses, which have been accessed by hackers.
Breach Affects Over Half of Hostinger's User Base
The company has over 29 million users, so the data breach affected over half of its complete user base.
However, it should be noted that the company used the weak SHA-1 hashing algorithm to scramble the Hostinger client passwords, making it easier for hackers to crack the passwords.
As a precautionary measure, the company has reset all Hostinger Client login passwords using the stronger SHA-2 algorithm and sent out emails password recovery emails to the affected consumers.
Also, the company doesn't currently offer two-factor authentication (2FA) for its customers' accounts, though it says it is planning to provide this additional layer of security in the near future.
Hostinger reassured its customers that no financial data is believed to have been accessed as the company never stores any payment card or other sensitive financial data on its servers, adding that third-party payment providers handle payments for its services.
Furthermore, the company has also assured that a thorough internal investigation found that the Hostinger Client accounts and data stored on those accounts, including websites, domains, and hosted emails, remained untouched and unaffected.
The investigation into the matter is still ongoing, and a team of internal and external forensics experts and data scientists has been assembled to discover the origin of the data breach and increase security measures of all the company's operations.
Following the password reset, the company is also urging its customers to set a strong and unique password for their Hostinger accounts and to be cautious of suspicious emails asking them to click on the links or download attachments, as well as any unsolicited communications asking for login details, or other personal information.
Customers who want to delete their details from Hostinger servers under GDPR rules should contact gdpr@hostinger.com.
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Data_Breaches
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Binance KYC Data Leak — Crypto Exchange Sets $290,000 Bounty On Blackmailer
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/binance-kyc-data-leak.html
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Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange Binance has become a victim of a ransom demand from a scammer who claimed to have hacked the KYC (Know Your Customer) data of thousands of its customers.
The unknown attacker threatened the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume to release KYC information of 10,000 users if the company did not pay 300 Bitcoins—that's equivalent to almost $3.5 million at today's exchange value.
Although the authenticity of the hack is not confirmed yet, several photos of individuals holding their identity cards, such as passports and voter IDs, have been circulating across different online channels.
In response to the incident, Binance just released an official statement today confirming that "an unidentified individual has threatened and harassed us, demanding 300 BTC in exchange for withholding 10,000 photos that bear similarity to Binance KYC data."
Binance said the company is still investigating the legitimacy of those images and has refused to pay the ransom and, as a result, the unidentified individual behind the demand began distributing the data online and to media outlets.
It seems like the attacker has created a Telegram group, which has already attracted over 10,000 people, and shared more than 400 images of people holding passports and identity documents from France, Turkey, the United States, Japan, Russia, and other nations around the world.
However, according to Binance, images posted to the attacker's Telegram group lacks the digital watermark the exchange uses for its internal information, adding doubts about its authenticity.
Binance also adds that its initial review of the leaked images shows they're all appeared to be dated from February of 2018 when the exchange "contracted a third-party vendor for KYC verification in order to handle the high volume of requests at that time."
"Currently, we are investigating with the third-party vendor for more information. We are continuing to investigate and will keep you informed," the company adds.
"The relevant law enforcement agencies have been contacted, and we will be working closely with them to pursue this person."
Additionally, the exchange is also offering a reward of 25 bitcoins—worth over $290,000—to anyone who provides information related to the identity of the blackmailer.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has also issued a statement on Twitter urging users not to fall for the "KYC leak" FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt), saying that the company is currently looking into the matter and will update its users shortly.
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Data_Breaches
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Capital One Data Breach Affects 106 Million Customers; Hacker Arrested
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/capital-one-data-breach.html
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Another week, another massive data breach.
Capital One, the fifth-largest U.S. credit-card issuer and banking institution, has recently suffered a data breach exposing the personal information of more than 100 million credit card applicants in the United States and 6 million in Canada.
The data breach that occurred on March 22nd and 23rd this year allowed attackers to steal information of customers who had applied for a credit card between 2005 and 2019, Capital One said in a statement.
However, the security incident only came to light after July 19 when a hacker posted information about the theft on her GitHub account.
The FBI Arrested the Alleged Hacker
The FBI arrested Paige Thompson a.k.a erratic, 33, a former Amazon Web Services software engineer who worked for a Capital One contractor from 2015 to 2016, in relation to the breach, yesterday morning and seized electronic storage devices containing a copy of the stolen data.
Thompson appeared in U.S. District Court on Monday and was charged with computer fraud and abuse, which carries up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. A hearing has been scheduled for August 1, 2019.
According to court documents [PDF], Thompson allegedly exploited a misconfigured firewall on Capital One's Amazon Web Services cloud server and unauthorizedly stole more than 700 folders of data stored on that server sometime in March.
"Capital One quickly alerted law enforcement to the data theft — allowing the FBI to trace the intrusion," U.S. Attorney Moran said. "I commend our law enforcement partners who are doing all they can to determine the status of the data and secure it."
It is important to note that Amazon Web Services was not compromised in any way since the alleged hacker gained access to the cloud server due to Capital One's misconfiguration and not through a vulnerability in Amazon's infrastructure.
Number of Customers and Types of Information Affected
The compromised data includes approximately 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers linked to American customers, and 1 million Canadian Social Insurance numbers.
Besides this, some customers' names, addresses, dates of birth, credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history, and contact information were also compromised in the security breach.
However, in a statement released on Monday, Capital One assured its customers that "no credit card account numbers or log-in credentials were compromised" and that more than 99% of the Social Security numbers that the company has on file weren't affected.
"Capital One immediately fixed the configuration vulnerability that this individual exploited and promptly began working with federal law enforcement," Capital One said.
"The FBI has arrested the person responsible. Based on our analysis to date, we believe it is unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual."
The company also said it will notify the affected customers and will provide free credit monitoring services to those affected.
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Data_Breaches
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Equifax to Pay up to $700 Million in 2017 Data Breach Settlement
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/equifax-data-breach-fine.html
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Equifax, one of the three largest credit-reporting firms in the United States, has to pay up to $700 million in fines to settle a series of state and federal investigations into the massive 2017 data breach that exposed the personal and financial data of nearly 150 million Americans—that's almost half the country.
According to an official announcement by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today, Equifax has agreed to pay at least $575 million in fines, but this penalty could rise to up to $700 million depending on the amount of compensation people claim.
Up to $425 million of the fines will go to a fund that will provide credit monitoring services to affected customers and compensate anyone who bought such services from the company and paid other related expenses as a result of the breach.
Rest $175 million and $100 million will go to civil penalties across 50 states and to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), respectively.
Besides the penalty, the company has also been ordered to provide all American consumers with six free credit reports each year for seven years, along with the one free annual credit report, starting from January 2020.
In September 2017, Equifax suffered a massive data breach that allowed hackers to steal personal information, including names, birth dates, addresses, social security numbers, and, in some cases, driver's license numbers, of as many as 147 million people.
The breach, which has been called one of the worst in American history, occurred due to failure of the company to patch a critical security vulnerability in its systems it was made aware of in March that year.
"Equifax failed to patch its network after being alerted in March 2017 to a critical security vulnerability affecting its ACIS database, which handles inquiries from consumers about their personal credit data," the FTC alleges.
"Even though Equifax's security team ordered that each of the company's vulnerable systems should be patched within 48 hours after receiving the alert, Equifax did not follow up to ensure the order was carried out by the responsible employees."
In fact, Equifax did not realize of its unpatched database until July 2017, when its security team detected suspicious traffic on its network, an investigation into the matter revealed that multiple hackers managed to exploit the vulnerability to gain entry to Equifax's network.
Gaining access to Equifax's network allowed hackers to access an unsecured file that included administrative credentials stored in plain text, which eventually let them gain access to consumers' personal data and operate undetected on the company's network for months.
"Equifax failed to take basic steps that may have prevented the breach that affected approximately 147 million consumers," said FTC Chairman Joe Simons.
"This settlement requires that the company take steps to improve its data security going forward, and will ensure that consumers harmed by this breach can receive help protecting themselves from identity theft and fraud."
The FTC has set up a dedicated page on its site to provide information to customers who want to make a claim against Equifax.
The commission has even set up a dedicated email (equifax@ftc.gov), encouraging Equifax employees to mail FTC if they "believe the company is failing to adhere to its data security promises."
Last year, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) also fined Equifax with £500,000 (over $622,000)—that's the maximum fine allowed by the UK's Data Protection Act 1998—for the 2017 data breach.
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Data_Breaches
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Slack Resets Passwords For Users Who Hadn't Changed It Since 2015 Breach
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/slack-password-data-breach.html
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If you use Slack, a popular cloud-based team collaboration server, and recently received an email from the company about a security incident, don't panic and read this article before taking any action.
Slack has been sending a "password reset" notification email to all those users who had not yet changed passwords for their Slack accounts since 2015 when the company suffered a massive data breach.
For those unaware, in 2015, hackers unauthorisedly gained access to one of the company's databases that stored user profile information, including their usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords.
At that time, attackers also secretly inserted code, probably on the login page, which allowed them to capture plaintext passwords entered by some Slack users during that time.
However, immediately following the security incident, the company automatically reset passwords for those small number of Slack users whose plaintext passwords were exposed, but asked other affected users to change their passwords manually.
Keep calm and change your password 😊
Slack is resetting the passwords for all those users (approximately 1% of total) who hadn't changed their passwords since 2015 when the company experienced a #databreach leaking users' credentialshttps://t.co/k6jSBgloAX
Check this thread: https://t.co/Fo7QbI9pOv
— The Hacker News (@TheHackersNews) July 18, 2019
Now in its latest statement released today, the company said they learned about a new list of username and password combinations that match with the login credentials of its users who did not change their password after the 2015 data breach.
"We were recently contacted through our bug bounty program with information about potentially compromised Slack credentials," Slack states.
"We immediately confirmed that a portion of the email addresses and password combinations were valid, reset those passwords, and explained our actions to the affected users."
The latest security incident only affects users, who:
created an account before March 2015,
have not changed their password since the incident, and
accounts that do not require logging in via a single-sign-on (SSO) provider.
The company is not exactly aware of the source of this new leaked plaintext credentials, but suggests it could be the "result of malware attack or password reuse between services."
It is also possible that someone might have successfully cracked hashed passwords that were leaked in the 2015 data breach, even when it was protected using the bcrypt algorithm with a randomly generated salt per-password.
Late last month, Slack also sent a separate notification to all the affected users informing them about the potential compromise of their credentials without providing any details of the incident, but it seems many users ignored the warning and did not change their passwords voluntarily.
Therefore, now Slack has automatically reset passwords on affected accounts, that are about 1% of the total registered users, that haven't been updated since 2015 as a precautionary measure, asking them to set a new password using this guide.
"We have no reason to believe that any of these accounts were compromised, but we believe that this precaution is worth any inconvenience the reset may cause," the company said.
Besides your changing password, you are also recommended to enable two-factor authentication for your Slack accounts, even if you are not affected.
Slack is still investigating the latest security incident and promises to share more information as soon as they are available.
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Data_Breaches
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Hacker Stole Data of Over 70% Bulgarian Citizens from Tax Agency Servers
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/bulgaria-nra-data-breach.html
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Eastern European country Bulgaria has suffered the biggest data breach in its history that compromised personal and financial information of 5 million adult citizens out of its total population of 7 million people.
According to multiple sources in local Bulgarian media, an unknown hacker earlier this week emailed them download links to 11GB of stolen data which included taxpayer's personal identifiable numbers, addresses, and financial data.
In a brief statement released Monday, the National Revenue Agency (NRA) of Bulgaria said the stolen data originates from the country's tax reporting service.
The NRA also indicated that the Ministry of the Interior and the State Agency for National Security (SANS) have started taking an assessment of the potential vulnerability in NRA's systems that attackers might have exploited to breach into its databases.
It appears that until now, the hacker, who claimed to be a Russian man, has only released 57 out of a total of 110 compromised databases, which is about 21GB in total.
In a follow-up announcement, the NRA said almost 20 days ago, the attacker unauthorizedly accessed about 3 percent of the information contained in their databases.
"Currently, e-services for citizens and businesses are functioning normally, with the exception of the VAT refund service paid abroad, as well as by the revenue office. Unregulated access to sensitive information is limited," the NRA said.
As consequences of the incident, Bulgaria's NRA tax agency is now facing a fine of up to 20 million euros ($22.43 million) or 4% of the agency's annual turnover over the data breach, said Prof. Veselin Tselkov, a member of the Commission for Personal Data Protection.
Suspected "White Hat" Hacker Arrested
Bulgarian police have also arrested a 20-year-old "white-hat hacker" as the main suspect for the NRA data breach after authorities raided his home and office in the capital Sofia and seized his computers containing encrypted data, according to a local media.
The arrested suspect, Christian Boykov, is a cybersecurity expert who has been training officers of the GCDPC for fighting organized cybercrime.
Boykov was in the news two years ago, when he found a vulnerability in the website of the Ministry of Education and Science (MES) and contacted "Lords of the Air," a popular TV show to tell the story only after the ministry ignored his initial disclosure.
After that incident, Boikov was hired as an ethical hacker by the global cybersecurity company "TAD Group," and at the moment of arrest, he was an employee of the company, where his job responsibility was to pentest the systems in the state agencies and private companies for potential vulnerabilities.
Since the investigation is still ongoing, at this moment, it's not clear if he is behind the NRA data breach. However, the Sofia City Prosecutor's Office accused Boykov of unauthorized access to a computer system that is part of the critical infrastructure of the state.
His lawyers say there is no evidence against the boy, but if proven guilty, Boikov—who has no past criminal record—could face up to 8 years in prison.
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Data_Breaches
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Marriott Faces $123 Million GDPR Fine Over Starwood Data Breach
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/marriott-data-breach-gdpr.html
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After fining British Airways with a record fine of £183 million earlier this week, the UK's data privacy regulator is now planning to slap world's biggest hotel chain Marriott International with a £99 million ($123 million) fine under GDPR over 2014 data breach.
This is the second major penalty notice in the last two days that hit companies for failing to protect its customers' personal and financial information compromised and implement adequate security measures.
In November 2018, Marriott discovered that unknown hackers compromised their guest reservation database through its Starwood hotels subsidiary and walked away with personal details of approximately 339 million guests.
The compromised database leaked guests' names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences.
The breach, which likely happened in 2014, also exposed unencrypted passport numbers for at least 5 million users and credit card records of eight million customers.
According to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), nearly 30 million residents of 31 countries in the European and 7 million UK residents were impacted by the Marriott data breach.
The ICO's investigation found that Marriott failed to undertake sufficient due diligence when it bought Starwood and should also have done more to secure its systems.
Last year, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in Europe that forces companies to make sure the way they collect, process, and store data are safe.
"The GDPR makes it clear that organizations must be accountable for the personal data they hold. This can include carrying out proper due diligence when making a corporate acquisition, and putting in place proper accountability measures to assess not only what personal data has been acquired, but also how it is protected," Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said.
"Personal data has real value so organizations have a legal duty to ensure its security, just like they would do with any other asset. If that doesn't happen, we will not hesitate to take strong action when necessary to protect the rights of the public."
Marriott International's president Arne Sorenson said the company was "disappointed" with the ICO's announcement and would contest the fine.
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Data_Breaches
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British Airways Fined £183 Million Under GDPR Over 2018 Data Breach
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/british-airways-breach-gdpr-fine.html
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Britain's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) today hit British Airways with a record fine of £183 million for failing to protect the personal information of around half a million of its customers during last year's security breach.
British Airways, who describes itself as "The World's Favorite Airline," disclosed a breach last year that exposed personal details and credit-card numbers of up to 380,000 customers and lasted for more than two weeks.
At the time, the company confirmed that customers who booked flights on its official website (ba.com) and British Airways mobile app between August 21 and September 5 had had their details stolen by attackers.
The cyberattack was later attributed to the infamous Magecart threat actor, one of the most notorious hacking groups specialized in stealing credit card details from poorly-secured websites, especially online eCommerce platforms.
Magecart hackers have been known for using digital credit card skimmer wherein they secretly insert a few lines of malicious code into the checkout page of a compromised website that captures payment details of customers and then sends it to a remote server.
Besides British Airways, Magecart groups have also been responsible for card breaches on sites belonging to high-profile companies like TicketMaster, Newegg, as well as sites belonging to other small online merchants.
In a statement released today, ICO said its extensive investigation found that a variety of information related to British Airways' customers was compromised by "poor security arrangements" at the company, including their names and addresses, log-ins, payment card data, and travel booking details.
"People's personal data is just that – personal. When an organization fails to protect it from loss, damage or theft, it is more than an inconvenience," Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said.
"That's why the law is clear – when you are entrusted with personal data, you must look after it. Those that don't will face scrutiny from my office to check they have taken appropriate steps to protect fundamental privacy rights."
However, ICO also said that British Airways has cooperated with its investigation and has made improvements to the security arrangements since the last year data breach came to light.
Since the data breach happened after the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect on May 2018, the fine of £183.39 million has been imposed on British Airways, which is the equivalent of 1.5% of the company's worldwide turnover for its 2017 financial year but is still less than the possible maximum of 4%.
In response to the ICO announcement, British Airways, owned by IAG, said the company was "surprised and disappointed" by the ICO penalty.
"British Airways responded quickly to a criminal act to steal customers' data," said British Airways chairman and chief executive Alex Cruz.
"We have found no evidence of fraud/fraudulent activity on accounts linked to the theft. We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience this event caused."
The company has 28 days to appeal the penalty.
Until now, the most significant penalty by the UK's data protection watchdog was £500,000, which was imposed on Facebook last year for allowing political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica to gather and misuse data of 87 million users improperly.
The same penalty of £500,000 was also imposed on credit reporting agency Equifax last year for its 2017's massive data breach that exposed the personal and financial information of hundreds of millions of its customers.
Since both the incidents in Facebook and Equifax occurred before GDPR took effect, £500,000 was the maximum penalty ICO can impose under the UK's old Data Protection Act.
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Data_Breaches
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MongoDB 4.2 Introduces End-to-End Field Level Encryption for Databases
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/06/mongodb-fle-data-encryption.html
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At its developer conference held earlier this week in New York, the MongoDB team announced the latest version of its database management software that includes a variety of advanced features, including Field Level Encryption, Distributed Transactions, and Wildcard Indexes.
The newly introduced Field Level Encryption (FLE), which will be available in the upcoming MongoDB 4.2 release, is an end-to-end encryption feature that encrypts and decrypts sensitive users' data on the client-side, preventing hackers from accessing plaintext data even if the database instance left exposed online or the server itself gets compromised.
Almost every website, app, and service on the Internet today usually encrypt (particularly "hashing") only users' passwords before storing them into the databases, but unfortunately left other sensitive information unencrypted, including users' online activity data and their personal information.
Moreover, even if there is an encryption mechanism to store data securely on the server, the private keys to unlock it and decryption operation also remain available on the server, which if get compromised, can be used by hackers to decrypt the data.
"With the rigor required by compliance to modern legal requirements, there comes the new need to ingest, query and store encrypted data securely in the database without the database having the ability to read it," the company says.
In other words, the cloud providers or administrators who have access to the database server itself can also access users' data—unencrypted or even server-side encrypted—without requiring any privilege from the clients.
MongoDB's Client-Side Field Level Encryption
However, MongoDB's new field-level encryption allows websites to solve this issue quickly as it does not involve performing cryptographic operations or storing encryption keys on the server.
Instead, FLE is a transparent client-side mechanism that relies on the MongoDB client library to act as a driver and handles the encryption and decryption operations on the users' devices to protect specific fields in a document against everyone except the user.
That means a specific chunk of encrypted data stored on an application's server can only be decrypted and accessed on the client-side using the right key/password which only belongs to the user.
"With this option, the server has no knowledge of the fields being encrypted. All the encryption and decryption is done at the driver level," the company said.
"It's the driver that when it sees an encrypted field is involved in a write or query command, gets appropriate keys from the key manager, encrypts the data, and sends it to the server."
"The server then only sees ciphertext and has no knowledge of the keys. When results are returned from the server, that ciphertext is sent by the server to the driver, and it's there that the driver, which already has the keys, decrypts it."
For now, MongoDB is only compatible with the AWS Key Management Service (KMS) service to make it easier for users to create and manage their keys to control the use of encryption across a service.
However, the company will soon make it compatible with Microsoft Azure Key Vault and Google Cloud services as well.
It should also be noted that MongoDB's field-level encryption doesn't prevent a data breach, but blocks hackers from accessing the sensitive data in plaintext when it is stolen, thus mitigating the risk.
In worst case scenarios, attackers can access limited data of only those targeted users whose systems somehow get compromised and leak the encryption key to the attackers.
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Data_Breaches
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When Time is of the Essence – Testing Controls Against the Latest Threats Faster
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/06/breach-attack-simulation.html
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A new threat has hit head the headlines (Robinhood anyone?), and you need to know if you're protected right now. What do you do?
Traditionally, you would have to go with one of the options below.
Option 1 – Manually check that IoCs have been updated across your security controls.
This would require checking that security controls such as your email gateway, web gateway, and endpoint security have all been updated with the latest threats' indicators of compromise (IoCs) usually published by AV companies who detect the malware binaries first.
Option 2 – Create a 'carbon copy' of your network and run the threat's binary on that copy.
While safe, IT and security teams may be unaware of certain variations from the real deal. So while the attack simulation is running against an 'ideal' copy, your real network may have undergone inadvertent changes, such as a firewall running in monitoring mode, a patch not being installed on time, and other unintentional variations. The resulting mirror image has inadvertently become a 'filtered' one.
Option 3 – Build a homegrown simulation.
While effective, developing your own malware simulation is a time- and resource-intensive effort that usually requires a dedicated threats or vulnerability assessment team.
Moreover, even if you have the resources, the turnaround time for getting a live and safe simulation to work may not be ideal.
Option 4 – Run an automated simulation of the threat in your production environment.
What if you could challenge your controls with a threat on the day that it hits the headlines? This is where automated security effectiveness testing can help.
By running simulations of the latest cyber attacks against the controls required to detect them correctly, you can make sure your current security arsenal is catching risky IoCs, and close any gaps faster.
Testing Security Control Effectiveness Faster
Using a dedicated golden image of a standard workstation (or server), attack simulations can be run continually on a designated system in a production network. This way, a real user's data is not jeopardized, while enabling you to check the latest threat's ability to bypass your security controls.
By running ongoing or daily simulations of the newest menaces across your network, you can determine if your controls are catching IoCs such as command & control (C2) URLs and malicious file hashes.
Immediate Threats Available for Simulation After Their Discovery [click the image to view full size]
Real vs. Simulated Cyber Attacks – What's the Difference?
So what is the difference between a real attack and a simulated one? First and foremost, simulations usually run on a dedicated system to avoid compromising a real user's system.
For C2 communications, a simulation will attempt to establish a connection over HTTP/S, with an agent installed on the endpoint serving as a proxy to block any malicious requests sent and dropping the connection at the end of the test.
When testing endpoint security controls, rather than executing a real payload, one simulation technique involves dropping a malware sample to see if security controls can detect and remove it.
To test the effectiveness of an email gateway, a simulated attack will send emails with weaponized attachments that contain different malicious behaviors but are harmless to the target system. An agent sitting on top of the email client handles incoming emails and deletes them immediately thereafter.
Immediate Insights Against Immediate Threats
What kind of insights can simulations uncover? Challenging email security controls can reveal whether your email gateway is blocking multi-layer nested files, whether a policy is set up to filter out spoofed email addresses or rarely-used file formats, or whether archive files (e.g., ZIP) are scanned to prevent executables from landing in a user's mailbox.
To prevent drive-by-downloads, it may alert that your web gateway is not blocking downloads associated with the newest threat's URLs. And vis-à-vis endpoint security, you may learn that your current solution is failing to block or detect dropped payloads on disk.
Immediate Threats Simulation Results – Blocked or Penetrated [click the image to view full size]
Ready to test the effectiveness of your security controls against the very latest threats?
Get started here, or learn more about SaaS-based breach and attack simulation.
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Data_Breaches
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Flipboard Database Hacked — Users' Account Information Exposed
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/05/flipboard-data-breach-hacking.html
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Flipboard, a popular social sharing and news aggregator service used by over 150 million people, has disclosed that its databases containing account information of certain users have been hacked.
According to a public note published yesterday by the company, unknown hackers managed to gain unauthorized access to its systems for nearly 10 months—between June 2, 2018, and March 23, 2019, and then again on April 21-22, 2019.
The hackers then potentially downloaded database containing Flipboard users' real name, usernames, cryptographically (salted hash) protected passwords and email addresses, including digital tokens for users who linked their Flipboard account to a third-party social media service.
According to a breach notification email sent out to affected users and seen by The Hacker News, the company has now reset passwords for all users as a precautionary measure, forcing users to create a new strong password for their accounts.
"You can continue to use Flipboard on devices from which you are already logged in. When you access your Flipboard account from a new device or the next time you log into Flipboard after logging out of your account, you will be asked to create a new password," the company said.
Flipboard also said it had not seen unauthorized access to any third-party account and still in the process of determining the total number of affected users.
The company has also decided to replace or delete all digital tokens, making them no longer valid and therefore cannot be misused.
"We have not found any evidence the unauthorized person accessed third-party account(s) connected to users' Flipboard accounts. As a precaution, we have replaced or deleted all digital tokens," the post read.
"If you connected your Flipboard account to a third-party account to see its content, you may notice in some cases that you need to reconnect it."
"Notably, Flipboard does not collect from users, and this incident did not involve, government-issued IDs (such as Social Security numbers or driver's license numbers), or payment card, bank account, or other financial information."
The company did not disclose the total number of users affected by the breach but said next time when you log into your Flipboard account you are required to update the password for your account.
Also, if you are making use of the same username and password combination as of Flipboard for any other online service, you are recommended to change your password there as well.
The company has notified law enforcement about the incident and is still investigating to know how hackers managed to gain access to their systems in the first place or what vulnerabilities they exploited.
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Data_Breaches
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Hackers Breach Stack Overflow Q&A Site, Some Users' Data Exposed
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/05/stack-overflow-databreach.html
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Note: We have updated this story to reflect new information after Stack Overflow changed its original announcement and shared more details on the security incident.
Stack Overflow, one of the largest question and answer site for programmers, revealed today that unknown hackers managed to exploit a bug in its development tier and then almost a week after they gained unauthorized access to its production version.
Founded by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky in 2008, Stack Overflow is the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network. With 10 million registered users and over 50 million unique visitors every month, Stack Overflow is very popular among professional and enthusiast programmers.
In an older version of the announcement published by Mary Ferguson, VP of Engineering at Stack Overflow, the company confirmed the breach but said it did not find any evidence that hackers accessed customers' accounts or any user data.
However, the updated announcement now says that after sitting quiet for a week, hackers executed privileged web requests, but were able to gain access to a very small portion of data, including IP address, names, and email address—and that for only a small number of users.
"Between May 5 and May 11, the intruder contained their activities to exploration. On May 11, the intruder made a change to our system to grant themselves a privileged access on production. This change was quickly identified and we revoked their access network-wide, began investigating the intrusion, and began taking steps to remediate the intrusion."
"We can now confirm that our investigation suggests the requests in question affected approximately 250 public network users. Affected users will be notified by us," Ferguson said.
The company also revealed hackers exploited a bug that was introduced in a recently deployed built to the development tier for the Stack Overflow website.
Stack Overflow said the company is patching all known vulnerabilities.
"We discovered and investigated the extent of the access and are addressing all known vulnerabilities," Ferguson said.
"As part of our security procedures to protect sensitive customer data, we maintain separate infrastructure and networks for clients of our Teams, Business, and Enterprise products and we have found no evidence that those systems or customer data were accessed. Our Advertising and Talent businesses were also not impacted by this intrusion."
Late last year, another popular question and answer website Quora suffered a massive data breach with hackers gaining access to sensitive information of about 100 million of its users, including their names, email addresses, hashed password, and personal messages.
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Data_Breaches
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U.S. Charges Chinese Hacker For 2015 Anthem Data Breach
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/05/chinese-hacker-anthem-breach.html
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The United States Justice Department today announced charges against a Chinese hacker and his hacking team member for their alleged role in the 2015 massive data breach at health insurance giant Anthem and three other unnamed American companies.
Fujie Wang (王 福 杰) and another hacker named John Doe with three different aliases—Deniel Jack, Kim Young, and Zhou Zhihong—are charged with four counts of conspiracy to commit fraud, wire fraud, and damage to a protected computer, according to an indictment [pdf] unsealed today in federal court in Indianapolis.
In 2015, the hackers managed to breach Anthem, the country's second-largest health insurance company and stole personal information of over 80 Millions of its customers, including their Social Security Numbers, birthdates, email addresses, residential addresses, medical identification numbers, employment information, and income data.
The incident marked as one of the worst data breaches in history, with the company paying a record $115 million fine to settle U.S. lawsuits.
According to the indictment, the hackers used sophisticated techniques, including spearfishing, to hack into the computer networks of the targeted businesses and then installed malware on their computers to further compromise the networks and gain access to sensitive users' data and confidential business information.
"As part of this international computer hacking scheme, the indictment alleges that beginning in February 2014, the defendants used sophisticated techniques to hack into the computer networks of the victim businesses without authorization," the DoJ says.
"On multiple occasions in January 2015, the defendants accessed the computer network of Anthem, accessed Anthem's enterprise data warehouse, and transferred encrypted archive files containing PII from Anthem's enterprise data warehouse from the United States to China."
Besides Anthem, the defendants also breached three other U.S. companies—a company in the technology sector, a basic materials company, and a communication services company—but the indictment does not reveal their names.
Wang and Doe are both charged with a total of four federal counts:
one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in relation to computers and identity theft
one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud
two substantive counts of intentional damage to a protected computer
However, the above charges are just allegations for now, and the "defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law."
The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
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Data_Breaches
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Binance Hacked — Hackers Stole Over $40 Million Worth Of Bitcoin
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/05/binance-cryptocurrency-hacked.html
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Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, confirmed today that the company lost nearly $41 million in Bitcoin in what appears to be its largest hack to date.
In a statement, Binance's CEO Changpeng Zhao said the company discovered a "large scale security breach" earlier on May 7, as a result of which hackers were able to steal roughly 7000 bitcoins, which worth 40.6 million at the time of writing.
News of the hack comes just hours after Zhao tweeted that Binance has "to perform some unscheduled server maintenance that will impact deposits and withdrawals for a couple of hours."
According to the company, malicious attackers used a variety of attack techniques, including phishing and computer viruses, to carry out the intrusion and were able to breach a single BTC hot wallet (a cryptocurrency wallet that's connected to the Internet), which contained about 2% of the company's total BTC holdings, and withdraw stolen Bitcoins in a single transaction.
What's more disturbing is that the company admitted the hackers managed to get their hands on user critical information, such as API keys, two-factor authentication codes, and potentially other information, which is required to log in to a Binance account.
Zao also warned that "hackers may still control certain user accounts and may use those to influence prices."
Fortunately, the Binance cold storage—the offline wallets where the majority of funds are kept—remain secure. Also, Internet-connected individual user wallets were not directly affected.
"All of our other wallets are secure and unharmed," the company said in a statement. "The hackers had the patience to wait, and execute well-orchestrated actions through multiple seemingly independent accounts at the most opportune time."
"The transaction is structured in a way that passed our existing security checks. It was unfortunate that we were not able to block this withdrawal before it was executed."
Binance has suspended all deposits and withdrawals on its platform for roughly one week while it thoroughly reviews the security and investigates the incident.
Binance CEO said the company last year set up an internal insurance mechanism, called Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU), which will cover the entire amount of the hack and won't impact users.
"To protect the future interests of all users, Binance will create a Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU)," Zhao said. "Starting from 2018/07/14, we will allocate 10% of all trading fees received into SAFU to offer protection to our users and their funds in extreme cases. This fund will be stored in a separate cold wallet."
Binance CEO also said he would participate in a previously scheduled Twitter Ask-Me-Anything.
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Data_Breaches
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Popular Online Tutoring Marketplace 'Wyzant' Suffers Data Breach
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/05/wyzant-data-breach.html
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Wyzant—an online marketplace that makes it easy for parents and students to connect with private tutors, in-person and online, in over 250 different subjects—has suffered a data breach exposing "certain personal identification information" for its customers.
The Hacker News received a copy of an email notification Wyzant recently sent to its affected customers, which reveals an unknown attacker was able to gain access to one of its databases on April 27, which the company identified a week after the security incident.
The stolen personal identification information for affected customers includes their first name, last name, email address, zip code, and, for certain customers, their Facebook profile image as well who log-in to the platform using Facebook.
Wyzant also explicitly made it clear that the stolen data did not include any password, payment information, or record of its customers' activity on the Wyzant platform, and that no other than the above-mentioned data was known to have been accessed.
Though it is still unclear how many customers were actually hit by the security breach, or if both tutors and students are affected, or what security hole the unknown attackers exploited to get into the company's network, the company did confirm that it has now patched the underlying issue.
With more than 2 million registered users and over 76,000 active tutors in its database, Wyzant is a decade-old popular tutoring service that bring students and instructors together, online and in-person.
In response to the security incident, Wyzant says it is performing an extensive audit of its entire network and application security infrastructure and will notify its customers of any significant development.
"Wyzant has implemented additional security measures designed to prevent a recurrence of such an attack and to protect the privacy of our valued customers," the company says.
"This includes reviewing our security processes and protocols. We are also working closely with law enforcement to ensure the incident is properly addressed."
For affected customers, Wyzant also warned them to beware of potential phishing attacks wherein attackers could use their personal information to trick them into providing additional personal information, such as credit card information or passwords.
The Hacker News has reached out to the company to know more about the data breach incident and will update this article as soon as we'll hear back from it.
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Data_Breaches
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Docker Hub Suffers a Data Breach, Asks Users to Reset Password
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/docker-hub-data-breach.html
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Docker Hub, one of the largest cloud-based library of Docker container images, has suffered a data breach after an unknown attacker gained access to the company's single Hub database.
Docker Hub is an online repository service where users and partners can create, test, store and distribute Docker container images, both publicly and privately.
The breach reportedly exposed sensitive information for nearly 190,000 Hub users (that's less than 5 percent of total users), including usernames and hashed passwords for a small percentage of the affected users, as well as Github and Bitbucket tokens for Docker repositories.
Docker Hub started notifying affected users via emails informing them about the security incident and asking them to change their passwords for Docker Hub, as well as any online account using the same password.
"On Thursday, April 25th, 2019, we discovered unauthorized access to a single Hub database storing a subset of non-financial user data. Upon discovery, we acted quickly to intervene and secure the site."
"For users with autobuilds that may have been impacted, we have revoked GitHub tokens and access keys, and ask that you reconnect to your repositories and check security logs to see if any unexpected actions have taken place."
The company has not revealed any further details about the security incident or how the unknown attackers gained access to its database.
Docker says the company is continuing to investigate the security breach and will share more information as it becomes available.
The company is also working to enhance its overall security processes and reviewing its policies following the breach.
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Data_Breaches
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New York, Canada, Ireland Launch New Investigations Into Facebook Privacy Breaches
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/facebook-privacy-investigation.html
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Facebook has a lot of problems, then there are a lot of problems for Facebook—and both are not going to end anytime sooner.
Though Facebook has already set aside $5 billion from its revenue to cover a possible fine the company is expecting as a result of an FTC investigation over privacy violations, it seems to be just first installment of what Facebook has to pay for continuously ignoring users' privacy.
This week, Facebook has been hit with three new separate investigations from various governmental authorities—both in the United States and abroad—over the company's mishandling of its users' data.
New York Attorney General to Investigate Facebook Email Collection Scandal
New York Attorney General is opening an investigation into Facebook's unauthorized collection of the email contacts of more than 1.5 million users during site registration without their permission.
Earlier this month, Facebook was caught practicing the worst ever user-verification mechanism by asking users new to its social network platform for their email account passwords to verify their identity.
However, just last week it turned out that the social network "unintentionally" uploaded email contacts from up to 1.5 million new users on its servers, without their consent or knowledge, Facebook admitted while saying the data was reportedly used to "build Facebook's web of social connections and recommend friends to add."
According to the New York Attorney General Letitia James, the harvested email addresses may have exposed hundreds of millions of Facebook users to targeted advertisements.
"Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumer information while at the same time profiting from mining that data," James said in a statement, adding that now it's time that the social media company should "held accountable for how it handles consumers' personal information."
In response to the news, a Facebook spokesperson told The NY Times that the company is "in touch with the New York State attorney general's office and are responding to their questions on this matter."
Ireland Investigating into Facebook Over Plaintext Passwords Scandal
The Irish Data Protection Commission had begun an investigation into a separate Facebook's privacy bunder exposed last month when the social network revealed that it left hundreds of millions of passwords of Facebook, Facebook Lite and Instagram users exposed in plain text on company servers.
At the time, it was reported that the incident exposed "tens of thousands" passwords of Instagram users in plaintext, while just last week it was revealed that the actual number of affected Instagram users were not in hundreds of thousands but millions.
The exposed passwords were potentially dated back to 2012 and were accessible to up to 2,000 Facebook employees.
In a statement on Thursday, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner said it has launched "a statutory inquiry in relation to this issue to determine whether Facebook has complied with its obligations under relevant provisions" of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) designed to protect people's data.
Canada to Sue Facebook Over Cambridge Analytica Scandal
Canadian regulators are also suing Facebook for allegedly violating the country's privacy laws following their investigation into the March 2018's Cambridge Analytica scandal and its impact on Canadians.
A joint report published Thursday from Canadian privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien and his British Columbia counterpart said lax security practices at the company allowed personal information of hundreds of thousands of Canadians to be used for political purposes.
The watchdogs started investigating Facebook last year after it was revealed that a UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvested data from about 87 million users and then used it for political gain without their knowledge or permission.
The report said Facebook committed a "major breach of trust" and "abdicated its responsibility for personal information under its control, effectively shifting that responsibility to users and apps."
The United States FTC is also investigating Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the company has already kept aside $5 billion from its revenue in anticipation of the settlement with the commission.
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Data_Breaches
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Over 100 Million JustDial Users' Personal Data Found Exposed On the Internet
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/justdial-hacked-data-breach.html
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An unprotected database belonging to JustDial, India's largest local search service, is leaking personally identifiable information of its every customer in real-time who accessed the service via its website, mobile app, or even by calling on its fancy "88888 88888" customer care number, The Hacker News has learned and independently verified.
Founded over two decades ago, JustDial (JD) is the oldest and leading local search engine in India that allows users to find relevant nearby providers and vendors of various products and services quickly while helping businesses listed in JD to market their offerings.
Rajshekhar Rajaharia, an independent security researcher, yesterday contacted The Hacker News and shared details of how an unprotected, publicly accessible API endpoint of JustDial's database can be accessed by anyone to view profile information of over 100 million users associated with their mobile numbers.
The leaked data includes JustDial users' name, email, mobile number, address, gender, date of birth, photo, occupation, company name they are working with—basically whatever profile related information a customer ever provided to the company.
Though the unprotected APIs exist since at least mid-2015, it's not clear if anyone has misused it to gather personal information on JustDial users.
Justdial is Leaking Personal Details Of All Customers
After verifying the leaky endpoint, The Hacker News also wanted to verify if the API is fetching results directly from the production server or from a backup database that might not have information belonging to recently signed-up users.
To find this, I provided Rajshekhar a new phone number that was never before registered with Justdial server, which he confirmed was not listed in the database at that time.
Instead of installing and using the JD app or its website, I then simply called the customer care number and shared a random name and personal details with the executive to learn a few good restaurants in my city.
Immediately after completing the call, Rajshekhar sent me the profile details I shared with the JD executive associated with the same phone number that was previously not found in the database, indicating that the unprotected API is fething real-time information of users.
Although the unprotected API is connected to the primary JD database, Rajshekhar revealed that it's an old API endpoint which is not currently being used by the company but left forgotten on the server.
Rajshekhar told The Hacker News that he discovered this unprotected end-point while pentesting the latest APIs in use, which are apparently protected and using authentication measures.
Besides this, Rajshekhar also found a few other old unprotected APIs, one of which could allow anyone to trigger OPT request for any registered phone number, which might not be a serious security issue, but could be used for spamming users and costing the company.
Rajshekhar also claimed that he tried to contact the company to responsibly disclose his findings, but unfortunately failed to find any direct way to contact the company and report the incident.
The Hacker News has also dropped an email to a few email addresses, linked to the company, we found on the Internet, providing the details of the incident. We will update this report when we hear back. Stay Tuned.
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Data_Breaches
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Hackers Compromise Microsoft Support Agent to Access Outlook Email Accounts
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/microsoft-outlook-email-hack.html
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If you have an account with Microsoft Outlook email service, there is a possibility that your account information has been compromised by an unknown hacker or group of hackers, Microsoft confirmed The Hacker News.
Earlier this year, hackers managed to breach Microsoft's customer support portal and access information related to some email accounts registered with the company's Outlook service.
Yesterday, a user on Reddit publicly posted a screenshot of an email which he received from Microsoft warning that unknown attackers were able to access some information of his OutLook account between 1 January 2019 and 28 March 2019.
Another user on Reddit also confirmed that he/she too received the same email from Microsoft.
According to the incident notification email, as shown below, attackers were able to compromise credentials for one of Microsoft's customer support agents and used it to unauthorisedly access some information related to the affected accounts, but not the content of the emails or attachments.
The information that a Microsoft's customer support agent can view is limited to account email addresses, folder names, subject lines of emails, and the name of other email addresses you communicate with.
"Our data indicates that account-related information (but not the content of any e-mails) could have been viewed, but Microsoft has no indication why that information was viewed or how it may have been used," the company says in the email.
It should be noted that since attackers had an alternative window, i.e., access to customer support account, to partially look inside the affected email accounts without actually having to log into each account, even the two-factor authentication was not able to prevent users' accounts.
At this time, it is not clear how the attackers were able to compromise Microsoft employee, but the tech company confirmed that it has now revoked the stolen credentials and started notifying all affected customers.
In an email to The Hacker News, Microsoft verified the authenticity of the notification email and confirmed the breach saying:
"We addressed this scheme, which affected a limited subset of consumer accounts, by disabling the compromised credentials and blocking the perpetrators' access."
However, Microsoft did not disclose the total number of accounts affected by the incident.
Although the breach did not directly impact your email login credentials, Microsoft recommended users to still consider resetting passwords for their Microsoft accounts just to be on the safer side.
"Microsoft regrets any inconvenience caused by this issue," the company says. "Please be assured that Microsoft takes data protection very seriously and has engaged its internal security and privacy teams in the investigation and resolution of the issue, as well as. additional hardening of systems and processes to prevent such recurrence."
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Data_Breaches
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540 Million Facebook User Records Found On Unprotected Amazon Servers
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/facebook-app-database.html
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It's been a bad week for Facebook users.
First, the social media company was caught asking some of its new users to share passwords for their registered email accounts and now…
...the bad week gets worse with a new privacy breach.
More than half a billion records of millions of Facebook users have been found exposed on unprotected Amazon cloud servers.
The exposed datasets do not directly come from Facebook; instead, they were collected and unsecurely stored online by third-party Facebook app developers.
Researchers at the cybersecurity firm UpGuard today revealed that they discovered two datasets—one from a Mexican media company called Cultura Colectiva and another from a Facebook-integrated app called "At the pool"—both left publicly accessible on the Internet.
More than 146 GB of data collected by Cultura Colectiva contains over 540 million Facebook user records, including comments, likes, reactions, account names, Facebook user IDs, and more.
The second dataset belonging to "At the Pool" app contains information about users' friends, likes, groups, and checked-in locations, as well as "names, plaintext passwords and email addresses for 22,000 people."
Though UpGuard believes the plaintext passwords found in the database were for the At the Pool app, and not for users' Facebook accounts, given the fact that people frequently re-use the same passwords for multiple apps, many of the leaked passwords could be used to access Facebook accounts.
"As Facebook faces scrutiny over its data stewardship practices, they have made efforts to reduce third-party access. But as these exposures show, the data genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Data about Facebook users have been spread far beyond the bounds of what Facebook can control today," experts at UpGuard said.
Both datasets were stored in unsecured Amazon S3 buckets, which have now been secured and taken offline after Upguard, Facebook and media contacted Amazon.
This is not the first time third-party companies have collected or misused Facebook data and sometimes leaked it to the public.
The most famous incident is the Cambridge Analytica scandal wherein the political data firm improperly gathered and misused data on 87 million users through a seemingly innocuous quiz app, for which the social media giant is facing £500,000 EU fine.
Though Facebook has since then tightened up its privacy controls ensuring apps use their access appropriately, the social media company is still facing intense pressure and criticism for not doing enough to offer better privacy and security to its 2.3 billion users.
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Data_Breaches
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Georgia Tech Data Breach Exposes 1.3 Million Users' Personal Data
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/georgia-tech-data-breach.html
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The Georgia Institute of Technology, well known as Georgia Tech, has confirmed a data breach that has exposed personal information of 1.3 million current and former faculty members, students, staff and student applicants.
In a brief note published Tuesday, Georgia Tech says an unknown outside entity gained "unauthorized access" to its web application and accessed the University's central database by exploiting a vulnerability in the web app.
Georgia Tech traced the first unauthorized access to its system to December 14, 2018, though it's unclear how long the unknown attacker(s) had access to the university database containing sensitive students and staff information.
The database contained names, addresses, social security numbers, internal identification numbers, and date of birth of current and former students, faculty and staff, and student applicants.
However, the University has launched a forensic investigation to determine the full extent of the breach.
"The information illegally accessed by an unknown outside entity was located on a central database. Georgia Tech's cybersecurity team is conducting a thorough forensic investigation to determine precisely what information was extracted from the system, which may include names, addresses, social security numbers, and birth dates," the note published on the University website reads.
The University's IT team discovered the web app vulnerability at the end of last month when it noticed a significant performance impact.
"Application developers for the Institute noticed a significant performance impact in one of its web applications and began an investigation on March 21, 2019," Georgia Tech says in the FAQs detailing the incident.
"During this investigation, it was determined the performance issue was the result of a security incident."
Georgia Tech has since patched the vulnerability and already started notifying potentially impacted individuals via email.
The University is also "coordinating with consumer reporting agencies and the University System of Georgia to determine what protections will be provided" to the affected individuals.
Georgia Tech has also notified the U.S. Department of Education and University System of Georgia (USG) and is expected to release more information soon.
"We continue to investigate the extent of the data exposure and will share more information as it becomes available. We apologize for the potential impact on the individuals affected and our larger community. We are reviewing our security practices and protocols and will make every effort to ensure that this does not happen again," the University said.
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Data_Breaches
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Hackers Steal $19 Million From Bithumb Cryptocurrency Exchange
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/03/bithumb-cryptocurrency-hacked.html
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Hackers yesterday stole nearly $19 million worth of cryptocurrency from Bithumb, the South Korea-based popular cryptocurrency exchange admitted today.
According to Primitive Ventures' Dovey Wan, who first broke the information on social media, hackers managed to compromise a number of Bithumb's hot EOS and XRP wallets and transferred around 3 million EOS (~ $13 million) and 20 million XRP (~ $6 million) to his newly-created accounts.
The hacker then distributedly transferred the stolen digital assets to his different accounts created on other cryptocurrency exchanges, including Huobi, HitBTC, WB, and EXmo, via ChangeNow, a non-custodial crypto swap platform does not require KYC/account.
Bithumb has been hacked multiple times in the past. Last time the popular cryptocurrency exchange was hacked in June 2018, when hackers stole $31 million, and in July 2017, when hackers stole $1 million worth of EOS from many wallets belonging to its users.
"And this is the second time Bithumb saw a MAJOR hack, last time it was hacked with a loss over $30m.. lol and after the first hack it was STILL able to get the fiat license from Korea and WTF??" Wan says on Twitter.
It has been reported that the private key for the EOS hot wallet account belonging to Bithumb was stolen (address g4ydomrxhege), which allowed the hacker to transfer the funds to his address, "ifguz3chmamg."
The above image shared by Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance cryptocurrency exchange, explains how hacker distributed his funds after stealing it from Bithumb.
Here's how the hacker distributed and transferred the stolen funds to his accounts on different exchanges:
EXMO: 662,600
Huobi: 263,605
Changelly 143,511
KuCoin: 96,270
CoinSwitch: 38,725
According to a blog post published by the company today, Bithumb is still investigating the hack, which it believes was performed with the help of an insider, and has reported the breach incident to security firm Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA) and cyber police.
"We deeply apologize to our members for delaying the cryptocurrency deposit and withdrawal service," Bithumb said.
"As a result of the inspection, it is judged that the incident is an accident involving insiders because the external intrusion path has not been revealed until now. Based on the facts, we are conducting intensive investigations with KISA, Cyber Police Agency and security companies."
Meanwhile, Bithumb said the company is working with major cryptocurrency exchanges and foundations in hope to recover the loss of the cryptocurrency equivalent.
Last year when the exchange was hacked and lost $30 million in EOS, it managed to recover half of the stolen funds.
Would Bithumb be able to do the same this time?
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Data_Breaches
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Round 4 — Hacker Puts 26 Million New Accounts Up For Sale On Dark Web
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/03/data-breach-security.html
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A hacker who was selling details of nearly 890 million online accounts stolen from 32 popular websites in three separate rounds has now put up a fourth batch of millions of records originating from 6 other sites for sale on the dark web.
The Hacker News today received a new email from the Pakistani hacker, who goes by online alias Gnosticplayers and previously claimed to have hacked dozens of popular websites from companies which, according to him, probably had no idea that they were compromised.
The hacker last month made three rounds of stolen accounts up for sale on the popular dark web market called Dream Market, posting details of 620 million accounts stolen from 16 websites in the first round, 127 million records from 8 sites in the second, and 92 million from 8 websites in the third.
Although while releasing the third round Gnosticplayers told The Hacker News that it would be his last batch of the stolen database, the hacker released the fourth round containing nearly 27 million new users' records originating from 6 other websites.
Gnosticplayers told The Hacker News in an email that the fourth round up for sale on Dream Market belonged to the following 6 hacked websites:
Youthmanual — Indonesian college and career platform — 1.12 million accounts
GameSalad — Online learning platform —1.5 million accounts
Bukalapak — Online Shopping Site — 13 million accounts
Lifebear — Japanese Online Notebook — 3.86 million accounts
EstanteVirtual — Online Bookstore — 5.45 Million accounts
Coubic — Appointment Scheduling — 1.5 million accounts
The hacker is selling each of the above listed hacked databases individually on Dream Market for a total worth 1.2431 Bitcoin, that's roughly $5,000.
Since the majority of compromised services listed in previous rounds have acknowledged the data breaches, it's likely that the new round of stolen accounts being sold on the underground market is also legit.
At this moment it is unknown that any of the services listed in the fourth round was aware of the data breach of its network and has previously disclosed any security incident.
The Hacker News has reached out the affected companies to inform them about the leak and to learn if they have already warned their users about any security incident related to the breach.
What's next? If you are a user of any of the above-listed services or websites disclosed in the previous three rounds, you should consider changing your passwords and also on other services in the event you re-used the same password.
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Data_Breaches
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Citrix Data Breach – Iranian Hackers Stole 6TB of Sensitive Data
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/03/citrix-data-breach.html
|
Popular enterprise software company Citrix that provides services to the U.S. military, the FBI, many U.S. corporations, and various U.S. government agencies disclosed last weekend a massive data breach of its internal network by "international cyber criminals."
Citrix said it was warned by the FBI on Wednesday of foreign hackers compromising its IT systems and stealing "business documents," adding that the company does not know precisely which documents the hackers obtained nor how they got in.
However, the FBI believes that the miscreants likely used a "password spraying" attack where the attackers guessed weak passwords to gain an early foothold in the company's network in order to launch more extensive attacks.
"While not confirmed, the FBI has advised that the hackers likely used a tactic known as password spraying, a technique that exploits weak passwords. Once they gained a foothold with limited access, they worked to circumvent additional layers of security," Citrix said in a blog post.
Although Citrix did not disclose many details about the breach, researchers at infosec firm Resecurity shed more light on the incident, claiming it had earlier alerted the Feds and Citrix about the "targeted attack and data breach."
Resecurity said the Iranian-backed IRIDIUM hacker group hit Citrix in December last year and again on Monday (March 4th) and stole at least 6 terabytes of sensitive internal files, including emails, blueprints, and other documents.
IRIDIUM is an Iranian-linked hacking group that was also behind recent cyber attacks against more than 200 government agencies worldwide, oil and gas companies, technology companies and other targets.
IRIDIUM proprietary techniques include bypassing multi-factor authentications for critical applications and services for further unauthorized access to VPN channels and SSO (Single Sign-On).
The massive data breach at Citrix has been identified as a part of "a sophisticated cyber espionage campaign supported by nation-state due to strong targeting on government, military-industrial complex, energy companies, financial institutions and large enterprises involved in critical areas of the economy," Resecurity said in a blog post.
"Based our recent analysis, the threat actors leveraged a combination of tools, techniques and procedures (TTPs) allowing them to conduct targeted network intrusion to access at least 6 terabytes of sensitive data stored in the Citrix enterprise network, including e-mail correspondence, files in network shares and other services used for project management and procurement."
Resecurity President Charles Yoo told NBC news that IRIDIUM broke its way into Citrix's internal network about 10 years ago, and has been lurking inside the company's system ever since.
The Florida-based company stressed that there was no sign that the hackers compromised any Citrix product or service, and that it launched a "forensic investigation," hired a top cybersecurity company, and took "actions" to secure its internal network.
Like the OPM breach, the consequences of the Citrix security incident could affect a broader range of targets, as the company holds sensitive data on other companies, including critical infrastructure, government and Enterprises.
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Data_Breaches
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Almost Half A Million Delhi Citizens' Personal Data Exposed Online
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/mongodb-delhi-database-leaked.html
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Exclusive — A security researcher has identified an unsecured server that was leaking detailed personal details of nearly half a million Indian citizens... thanks to another MongoDB database instance that company left unprotected on the Internet accessible to anyone without password.
In a report shared with The Hacker News, Bob Diachenko disclosed that two days ago he found a 4.1 GB-sized highly sensitive database online, named "GNCTD," containing information collected on 458,388 individuals located in Delhi, including their Aadhaar numbers and voter ID numbers.
Though it's not clear if the exposed database is linked to the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD), Diachenko found that the database contains references and email addresses with "transerve.com" domain for users registered with "senior supervisor," and "super admin" designations.
Based upon the information available on Transerve Technologies website, it is a Goa-based company that specializes in smart city solutions and advanced data collection technology.
The company's data collector, precision mapping and location intelligence tool help businesses across various sectors and Governments agencies to utilize Geo-location data to make smart decisions intelligently.
The leaked database contains the following tables:
EB Users (14,861 records)
Households (102,863 records)
Individuals (458,388 records)
Registered Users (399 records)
Users (2,983 records)
Analyzed by Diachenko, one of the database tables containing registered users includes email addresses, hashed passwords and usernames for administrator access.
"The most detailed information contained in 'Individuals' collection which was basically a pretty detailed portrait of a person, incl. health conditions, education, etc.," Diachenko said.
"Households collection contained fields such as 'name', 'house no', 'floor number', 'geolocation', area details, 'email_ID' of a supervisor, 'is the household cooperating for survey' field, 'type of latrine', 'functional water meter', 'ration card number', 'internet facility available' and even 'informan name' field."
"It remains unknown just how long database was online and if anyone else accessed it," Diachenko said.
When Transerve didn't respond to the responsible disclosure sent via email, Diachenko contacted Indian CERT, which further coordinated with the company to take its exposed database offline immediately.
"The danger of having an exposed MongoDB or similar NoSQL databases is a huge risk. We have previously reported that the lack of authentication allowed the installation of malware or ransomware on thousands of MongoDB servers," Diachenko said.
"The public configuration allows the possibility of cybercriminals to manage the whole system with full administrative privileges. Once the malware is in place, criminals could remotely access the server resources and even launch a code execution to steal or completely destroy any saved data the server contains."
MongoDB is the most popular, open-source NoSQL database used by companies of all sizes, from eBay and Sourceforge to The New York Times and LinkedIn.
This isn't the first time when MongoDB instances are found exposed to the Internet. In recent years, we have published several reports where unprotected database servers have already exposed billions of records.
None of this is MongoDBs fault, as administrators are always advised to follow the security checklist provided by the MongoDB maintainers.
On older versions of MongoDB before version 2.6.0, the default configuration makes the database listening on a publicly accessible port, where admins are supposed to reconfigure it appropriately for online use, but, unfortunately, many don't.
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Data_Breaches
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LPG Gas Company Leaked Details, Aadhaar Numbers of 6.7 Million Indian Customers
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/indane-aadhaar-leak.html
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Why would someone bother to hack a so-called "ultra-secure encrypted database that is being protected behind 13 feet high and 5 feet thick walls," when one can simply fetch a copy of the same data from other sources.
French security researcher Baptiste Robert, who goes by the pseudonym "Elliot Alderson" on Twitter, with the help of an Indian researcher, who wants to remain anonymous, discovered that the official website of popular state-owned LPG gas company Indane is leaking personal details of its millions of customers, including their Aadhaar numbers.
This is not the first time when an unprotected third-party database has leaked Aadhaar details of Indian citizens, which is a unique number assigned to each citizen as part of India's biometric identity programme maintained by the government's Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
Earlier this week an anonymous Indian researcher initially discovered a loophole in the Indane's online dealers portal that could allow anyone to access hundreds of thousands of customers data associated with their respective dealers without requiring any authentication.
"Due to a lack of authentication in the local dealers portal, Indane is leaking the names, addresses and the Aadhaar numbers of their customers," Robert wrote in a blog post on Medium late Monday.
To avoid getting into trouble from Indian authorities, the researcher shared his findings with Robert, who previously gained fame for exposing numerous Aadhaar-related leaks and security weaknesses in other Indian website and services.
After analyzing the issue, Robert discovered that attackers can actually fetch millions of Indian citizens data from the Indane website if they know every dealer's username, which he later found using another vulnerability in the Indane's official mobile app.
The mobile app vulnerability allowed Robert to find 11,062 valid dealer IDs, out of which he used 9490 IDs against the online dealers portal to fetch personal data of 5.8 million users, including their Aadhaar numbers, names and residential addresses.
"Unfortunately, Indane probably blocked my IP, so I didn't test the remaining 1572 dealers. By doing some basic math we can estimate the final number of affected customers around 6,791,200," Robert says.
Robert shared his findings with Indane, an LPG brand owned by the Indian Oil Corporation, on 15th February, and made the public disclosure on 19th February after receiving no response from the company.
Official Response From Indane LPG Company
In response to this news, Indian Oil Corp Ltd, who owns Indane, tweeted a statement saying, "There is no leak of Aadhaar data through Indane website."
In an attached statement, instead of acknowledging the breach of its customers' data, the company tried to defend Aadhaar and Indian Government by saying:
"IndianOil in its software captures only the Aadhaar number which is required for LPG subsidy transfer. No other Aadhaar related details are captured by IndianOil. Therefore, leakage of Aadhaar data is not possible through us."
"In the past, Oil Marketing Companies on time to time basis were hosting the consumption of subsidized LPG refills by consumers, multiple connections list having customer information like consumer number, name, LPG ID and address, in public domain (transparency portal) in their respective websites which was available for social audits."
"There is no Aadhaar number hosted on this website."
However, The Hacker News has reviewed the sample database provided by Robert and can confirm that the website also hosts Aadhaar numbers of its customers, not directly displayed on the web page, but in the URL hyperlinked to each customer's ID.
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Data_Breaches
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Over 92 Million New Accounts Up for Sale from More Unreported Breaches
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/data-breach-sale-darkweb.html
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All these numbers….
"More than 5 billion records from 6,500 data breaches were exposed in 2018" — a report from Risk Based Security says.
"More than 59,000 data breaches have been reported across the European since the GDPR came into force in 2018" — a report from DLA Piper says.
…came from data breaches that were reported to the public, but in reality, more than half of all data breaches actually go unreported.
Just last week, we disclosed the existence of some massive unreported data breaches in two rounds, which a hacker has now started monetizing by selling stolen user databases publicly.
Now, a new set of databases containing millions of hacked accounts from several websites has been made available for sale on the dark web marketplace by the same hacker who goes by online alias Gnosticplayers.
Gnosticplayers last week made two rounds of stolen accounts up for sale on the popular dark web marketplace called Dream Market, posting details of nearly 620 million accounts stolen from 16 popular websites in the first round and 127 million records originating from 8 other sites in the second.
The third round, which the hacker told The Hacker News would be his last round, published Sunday contained more than 92 million hacked users' accounts stolen from 8 websites, including the popular GIF hosting platform Gfycat.
New List of Hacked Websites
Gnosticplayers told The Hacker News in an email that the third round up for sale on Dream Market belonged to the following 8 hacked websites:
Pizap (Photo editor) — 60 million
Jobandtalent (Online job portal) — 11 million
Gfycat (GIF hosting service) — 8 million
Storybird (Online publishing platform) — 4 million
Legendas.tv (Movie streaming site) — 3.8 million
Onebip (Mobile payment service) — 2.6 million
Classpass (Fitness and Yoga center) — 1.5 million
Streeteasy (Real estate) — 990,000 (1 million)
The hacker is selling each of the above listed hacked databases individually on Dream Market for a total worth 2.6249 Bitcoin (roughly $9,700).
In an interview with The Hacker News, Gnosticplayers said none of the services listed in the third round was aware of the data breach of its network and has previously disclosed any such security incident.
Since the majority of compromised services listed in the first and second batches have confirmed the previously-unreported or undetected data breaches, it's likely that the new round of stolen accounts being sold on the underground market is also legit.
While the third round of the stolen accounts has been up for sale on the Dream Market, the first and second collections have already been removed from the underground market (except a round-2 database from interior designing service Houzz) by the hacker to avoid them from getting leaked or land on security initiatives like Google's new Password Checkup tool.
What's next? If you are a user of any of the above-listed services or websites disclosed in the previous two rounds, you should consider changing your passwords and also on other services in the event you re-used the same password.
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Data_Breaches
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Hacker Breaches Dozens of Sites, Puts 127 Million New Records Up for Sale
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/data-breach-website.html
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A hacker who was selling details of nearly 620 million online accounts stolen from 16 popular websites has now put up a second batch of 127 million records originating from 8 other sites for sale on the dark web.
Last week, The Hacker News received an email from a Pakistani hacker who claims to have hacked dozens of popular websites (listed below) and selling their stolen databases online.
During an interview with The Hacker News, the hacker also claimed that many targeted companies have probably no idea that they have been compromised and that their customers' data have already been sold to multiple cyber criminal groups and individuals.
Package 1: Databases From 16 Compromised Websites On Sale
In the first round, the hacker who goes by online alias "gnosticplayers" was selling details of 617 million accounts belonging to the following 16 compromised websites for less than $20,000 in Bitcoin on dark web marketplace Dream Market:
Dubsmash — 162 million accounts
MyFitnessPal — 151 million accounts
MyHeritage — 92 million accounts
ShareThis — 41 million accounts
HauteLook — 28 million accounts
Animoto — 25 million accounts
EyeEm — 22 million accounts
8fit — 20 million accounts
Whitepages — 18 million accounts
Fotolog — 16 million accounts
500px — 15 million accounts
Armor Games — 11 million accounts
BookMate — 8 million accounts
CoffeeMeetsBagel — 6 million accounts
Artsy — 1 million accounts
DataCamp — 700,000 accounts
Out of these, the popular photo-sharing service 500px has confirmed that the company suffered a data breach in July last year and that personal data, including full names, usernames, email addresses, password hashes, location, birth date, and gender, for all the roughly 14.8 million users existed at the time was exposed online.
Just yesterday, Artsy, DataCamp and CoffeeMeetsBagel have also confirmed that the companies were victims of a breach last year and that personal and account details of their customers was stolen by an unauthorized attacker.
Diet tracking service MyFitnessPal, online genealogy platform MyHeritage and cloud-based video maker service Animoto had confirmed the data breaches last year.
In response to the news, video-sharing app Dubsmash also issued a notice informing its users that they have launched an investigation and contacted law enforcement to look into the matter.
Package 2: Hacked Databases From 8 More Websites On Sale
While putting the second round of the stolen accounts up for sale on the Dream Market—one of the largest dark web marketplaces for illegal narcotics and drug paraphernalia—the hacker removed the collection of the first round to avoid them from getting leaked and land on security initiatives like Google's new Password Checkup tool.
Gnosticplayers told The Hacker News in an email that the second round listed stolen data from 127 million accounts that belonged to the following 8 hacked websites, which was up for sale for $14,500 in bitcoin:
Houzz — 57 million accounts
YouNow — 40 million accounts
Ixigo — 18 million accounts
Stronghold Kingdoms — 5 million accounts
Roll20.net — 4 million accounts
Ge.tt — 1.83 million accounts
Petflow and Vbulletin forum — 1.5 million accounts
Coinmama (Cryptocurrency Exchange) — 420,000 accounts
Of the above-listed websites, only Houzz has confirmed the security breach earlier this month that compromised its customers' public information and certain internal account information.
Like the first round, the recent collection of 127 million stolen accounts has also been removed from the sale on the dark web.
Though some of the services are resetting users' passwords after confirming its data was stolen, if you are a user of any of the above-listed services, you should consider changing your passwords in the event you re-used the same password across different websites.
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Data_Breaches
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Google's New Tool Alerts When You Use Compromised Credentials On Any Site
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/google-password-checkup-breaches.html
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With so many data breaches happening almost every week, it has become difficult for users to know if their credentials are already in possession of hackers or being circulated freely across the Internet.
Thankfully, Google has a solution.
Today, February 5, on Safer Internet Day, Google launches a new service that has been designed to alert users when they use an exact combination of username and password for any website that has previously been exposed in any third-party data breach.
The new service, which has initially been made available as a free Chrome browser extension called Password Checkup, works by automatically comparing the user's entered credential on any site to an encrypted database that contains over 4 billion compromised credentials.
If the credentials are found in the list of compromised ones, Password Checkup will prompt users to change their password.
Wondering if Google can see your login credentials? No, the company has used a privacy-oriented implementation that keeps all your information private and anonymous by encrypting your credentials before checking them against its online database.
"We designed Password Checkup with privacy-preserving technologies to never reveal this personal information to Google," the company emphasizes. "We also designed Password Checkup to prevent an attacker from abusing Password Checkup to reveal unsafe usernames and passwords. Finally, all statistics reported by the extension are anonymous."
You can also check this easy 4-step visual explanation to learn more about how it works under the hood.
Moreover, it is not yet another "weak password warning tool" that alerts users whenever they use a commonly used or easily crackable password for any website.
"We designed Password Checkup only to alert you when all of the information necessary to access your account has fallen into the hands of an attacker," Google says.
"We will not bother you about outdated passwords youn have already reset or merely weak passwords like '123456.' We only generate an alert when both your current username and password appear in a breach, as that poses the greatest risk."
The Chrome browser extension, Password Checkup, is available from today, and anyone can download it for free.
Besides launching the new Chrome extension, Google also lists five Official Security Tips which includes keeping your software up-to-date, using unique passwords for every site, taking the Google security checkup, setting up a recovery phone number or email address, and making use of two-factor authentication.
Chrome users can follow these security tips to keep themselves safe on the Internet.
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Data_Breaches
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Airbus Suffers Data Breach, Some Employees' Data Exposed
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/airbus-data-breach.html
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European airplane maker Airbus admitted yesterday a data breach of its "Commercial Aircraft business" information systems that allowed intruders to gain access to some of its employees' personal information.
Though the company did not elaborate on the nature of the hack, it claimed that the security breach did not affect its commercial operations. So, there's no impact on aircraft production.
Airbus confirmed that the attackers unauthorized accessed some data earlier this month, which the plane manufacturer claimed was "mostly professional contact and IT identification details of some Airbus employees in Europe."
"Investigations are ongoing to understand if any specific data was targeted; however we do know some personal data was accessed," Airbus said in its press release published on Wednesday.
After detecting the security breach, the plan manufacturer started an investigation to determine the origin of the hack and to understand the full scope of the data breach and if any specific data was targeted.
The company has begun taking "immediate and appropriate actions to reinforce existing security measures," which were not enough to keep the hackers out of their systems, "and to mitigate its potential impact" so that it can prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.
The company has also instructed its employees to "take all necessary precautions going forward," to strengthen their security defenses.
Airbus also said it was in contact with the relevant regulatory authorities and the data protection authorities pursuant to the European Union's new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) rules.
Airbus is the world's second-largest manufacturers of commercial airplanes, after Boeing which was also hit by a cyber attack (a variant of the infamous WannaCry ransomware) in March last year that "affected a small number of systems" with no impact on production.
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Data_Breaches
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Google fined $57 million by France for lack of transparency and consent
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/google-privacy-gdpr-fine.html
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The French data protection watchdog CNIL has issued its first fine of €50 million (around $57 million) under the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law that came into force in May last year.
The fine has been levied on Google for "lack of transparency, inadequate information and lack of valid consent regarding the ads personalization," the CNIL (National Data Protection Commission) said in a press release issued today.
The fine was imposed following the latest CNIL investigation into Google after receiving complaints against the company in May 2018 by two non-profit organizations—None Of Your Business (NOYB) and La Quadrature du Net (LQDN).
Why Has Google Been Fined?
According to the CNIL, Google has been found violating two core privacy rules of the GDPR—Transparency, and Consent.
First, the search engine giant makes it too difficult for users to find essential information, like the "data-processing purposes, the data storage periods or the categories of personal data used for the ads personalisation," by excessively disseminating them across several documents with buttons and links and requiring up to 6 separate actions to get to the information.
And even when the users find the information they are looking for, the CNIL says that information is "not always clear nor comprehensive."
"Users are not able to fully understand the extent of the processing operations carried out by Google," the Commission says. "Similarly, the information communicated is not clear enough so that the user can understand that the legal basis of processing operations for the ads personalization is the consent and not the legitimate interest of the company."
Secondly, Google does not obtain its user's valid consent to process data for ads personalization purposes.
Google Fined For Violating GDPR Law
According to the CNIL, the option to personalize ads is "pre-ticked" when creating an account with Google, effectively making its users unable to exercise their right to opt out of data processing for ads personalization, which is illegal under the GDPR.
Finally, the CNIL says Google by default ticks the boxes that say "I agree to Google's Terms of Service" and that "I agree to the processing of my information as described above and further explained in the Privacy Policy" when users create an account.
However, broader consent like this is also illegal under the GDPR rules.
"The user gives his or her consent in full, for all the processing operations purposes carried out by Google based on this consent (ads personalization, speech recognition, etc.)," the Commission says.
Although the 50 million euros fine seems large, it is small compared to the maximum penalty allowed by GDPR for large companies like Google, which is 20 million euros or 4 percent of the company's annual global revenue, whichever is higher.
Besides Google, NOYB and LQDN also filed a complaint against Facebook in May, so let's see what happens to Facebook next.
Other Record Fines On Google
It's not the first time when Google has been fined under privacy violation. Back in July, the company was levied with a record $5 billion fine by the EU in an Android antitrust case, which Google is currently appealing.
However, a few months back, the search engine giant overhauled its Android business model in Europe, electing to charge a fee to European Android phone manufacturers who want to include its apps on their Android handsets.
The EU also hit Google with a separate antitrust penalty of $2.7 billion (2.4 billion euros) in 2017 over shopping-search results in Google Search.
In response to the GDPR fine imposed by France, Google said in a statement: "People expect high standards of transparency and control from us. We're deeply committed to meeting those expectations and the consent requirements of the GDPR. We're studying the decision to determine our next steps."
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Data_Breaches
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20-Year-Old Man Arrested For Carrying Out Germany's Biggest Data Leak
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/germany-data-leak-arrested.html
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German federal police have arrested a 20-year-old local student for stealing and publishing a massive trove of personal data of hundreds of politicians, journalists and other public figures last month.
The young man, whose identity has not been revealed by the police, was arrested after police raided his parent's house in west-central German State of Hesse on Sunday and recovered a computer that the suspect tried to destroy 2 days before the search and a data backup.
The suspect, who believed to have acted alone, has admitted of carrying out the mass hacking of German politicians out of anger at their political statements, BKA Federal Criminal Police revealed.
"The accused was interrogated on 07.01.2019 by the senior prosecutor and officials of the Federal Criminal Police Office. He comprehensively acknowledged the allegations against him and provided information on his own offenses," the BKA said in a press release.
"Due to a lack of grounds for detention, the accused was released in the evening hours of 07.01.2019 and the provisional arrest canceled. The evidence seized as part of the search warrant, in particular computers and data carriers, is currently being fully evaluated."
Despite not being a computer expert, the man managed to access and leak personal data from about 1,000 people, including Chancellor Merkel, journalists, and politicians from parties currently represented in the federal parliament, including the CDU, CSU, SPD, FDP, Left party (Die Linke) and Greens.
Known on Twitter by the name "G0d," the suspect published private data about German politicians, journalists, and celebrities on Twitter, under the username @_0rbit.
Telephone numbers, private chats, and letters, some credit card data, addresses and copies of identity cards of victims were all exposed in what believed to be one of the country's biggest data breaches in the history.
Unlike as initially feared, early evidence suggests no involvement of foreign intelligence or activists for far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), who was not targeted by the attacker, in the incident.
Besides German politicians, the intrusive hack attacks also affected well-known actor Til Schweiger, two renowned German comedians, Jan Boehmermann and Christian Ehring, as well as dozens of journalists from ZDF and ARD–public-funded German media outlets.
Germany is still in the process of removing the exposed data from the Internet, but there are no signs that any information was released that would be considered politically explosive or increase security risks.
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Data_Breaches
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Town of Salem Data Breach Exposes 7.6 Million Gamers' Accounts
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/town-of-salem-data-breach.html
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A massive data breach at the popular online role-playing game 'Town of Salem' has reportedly impacted more than 7.6 million players, the game owner BlankMediaGames (BMG) confirmed Wednesday on its online forum.
With the user base of more than 8 million players, Town of Salem is a browser-based game that enables gamers (which range from 7 to 15 users) to play a version of the famous secret role game Town, Mafia, or Neutrals.
The data breach was first discovered and disclosed on December 28 when a copy of the compromised Town of Salem database was anonymously sent to DeHashed, a hacked database search engine.
Over 7.6 Million Users Accounts Compromised
The database included evidence of the server compromise and access to the complete gamer database which contained 7,633,234 unique email addresses (most-represented of the email providers being Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo.com).
After analyzing the complete database, DeHashed disclosed that the compromised data contained the following information on Town of Salem players:
Email addresses
Usernames
Hashed passwords (in phpass, MD5(WordPress), and MD5(phpBB3) formats)
IP addresses
Game and forum activity
Some payment information (including full names, billing and shipping addresses, IP information and payment amount).
DeHashed also stated that "some of the users who paid for certain premium features having their billing information/data breached as well," though BlankMediaGames confirmed that no credit-card numbers were exposed in the breach.
"We do not handle money. At all. The third party payment processors are the ones that handle all of that," a company's spokesperson said on the official Town of Salem game forum on January 2 while confirming the breach.
"We never see your credit card, payment information, anything like that. We don't have access to that information."
Town of Salem developers addressed the security incident Wednesday by removing three separate, malicious PHP files (which render HTML content for viewing in the browser) from their web server that allowed the attacker to have a backdoor into their server.
The company is also in the process of contacting security auditing firms and potentially discussing reinstalling all of its "servers from scratch just to be 100% sure."
Account Passwords Stored Using Insecure MD5 Hashing Algorithm
Although the game developers said that each password was stored in their database as a "salted MD5 hash," the game players are highly recommended to change their passwords as soon as possible because the MD5 hash function has long been known to be susceptible to brute force attacks.
The MD5 hashing algorithm is widely considered to be extremely insecure, following the leaking of more than 117 million LinkedIn passwords that had been hashed similarly and brute-forced to get the plain text passwords.
BlankMediaGames is expected to be changing up its password-hashing approach, as the company said: "We are making plans to replace PHPBB with a more secure forum such as Vanilla, and moving to a more secure hashing algorithm."
BlankMediaGames says it will soon be sending out mass emails to all Town of Salem users impacted by the data breach but adds that its number one priority currently is to ensure that its "servers are secure" and to add support in its code for "forced password resets."
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Data_Breaches
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Mayday! NASA Warns Employees of Personal Information Breach
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https://thehackernews.com/2018/12/nasa-hack-data-breach.html
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Another day, another data breach. This time it's the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
NASA today confirmed a data breach that may have compromised personal information of some of its current and former employees after at least one of the agency's servers was hacked.
In an internal memo sent to all employees on Tuesday, NASA said the unknown hackers managed to gain access to one of its servers storing the personally identifiable information (PII), including social security numbers, of current and former employees.
The agency said NASA discovered the breach on October 23 when its cybersecurity personnel began investigating a possible breach of two of its servers holding employee records.
After discovering the intrusion, NASA has since secured its servers and informed that the agency is working with its federal cybersecurity partners "to examine the servers to determine the scope of the potential data exfiltration and identify potentially affected individuals." However, NASA said this process "will take time."
It should be noted that no space missions were jeopardized by the cyber incident, the agency said.
According to the agency, any NASA Civil Service employee who joined, left, or transferred within the agency from July 2006 to October 2018 may have had their personal data compromised. NASA currently employs roughly 17,300 people.
The agency said all the affected employees would be notified once identified, and offered identity theft protection services and related resources to all affected employees, past and present.
"Our entire leadership team takes the protection of personal information very seriously. Information security remains a top priority for NASA," said Bob Gibbs, assistant administrator at NASA's Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer.
"NASA is continuing its efforts to secure all servers, and is reviewing its processes and procedures to ensure that the latest security practices are being followed throughout the agency."
This is not the first time when the agency's servers have been compromised. NASA suffered a massive security breach in 2016 when a hacking group released 276GB of sensitive data including flight logs and credentials of thousands of its employees.
At that time, the hackers even attempted to crash a $222 million drone into the Pacific Ocean by gaining control over the drone by rerouting the flight path.
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Data_Breaches
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Twitter Discloses Suspected State-Sponsored Attack After Minor Data Breach
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https://thehackernews.com/2018/12/twitter-data-breach.html
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Twitter has been hit with a minor data breach incident that the social networking site believes linked to a suspected state-sponsored attack.
In a blog post published on Monday, Twitter revealed that while investigating a vulnerability affecting one of its support forms, the company discovered evidence of the bug being misused to access and steal users' exposed information.
The impacted support form in question was used by account holders to contact Twitter about issues with their account.
Discovered in mid-November, the support form API bug exposed considerably less personal information, including the country code of users' phone numbers associated with their Twitter account, and "whether or not their account had been locked."
So far the company has declined to provide more details about the incident or an estimate for the number of accounts potentially impacted but says it believes that the attack may have ties to state-sponsored actors.
"During our investigation, we noticed some unusual activity involving the affected customer support form API. Specifically, we observed a large number of inquiries coming from individual IP addresses located in China and Saudi Arabia," Twitter says in a post about the incident.
"While we cannot confirm intent or attribution for certain, it is possible that some of these IP addresses may have ties to state-sponsored actors."
Twitter also assures its users that the issue does not expose full phone numbers or any other personal data related to the user.
Twitter says that the social networking site addressed the issue within just one day on November 16 and that there is no action required from the users' side.
When the company became aware of the incident, it started investigating the origins and background of the breach to "provide you with as much information as possible," and also updated law enforcement.
Twitter has started directly notifying the users who, according to the company, have been impacted by the incident.
"We have directly informed the people we identified as being affected," the company writes. "We are providing this broader notice as it is possible that other account holders we cannot identify were potentially impacted."
Like other social media platforms, Twitter has also been hit by a number of security incidents this year.
In May, Twitter urged all of its 330 million users to change their passwords after a software glitch unintentionally exposed its users' account passwords by storing them in plain text on an internal log.
In September, a flaw in Twitter's Account Activity API exposed some of its users' direct messages (DMs) and protected tweets to unauthorized, third-party app developers who weren't supposed to get them.
Over the weekend, Twitter was also hit by another software glitch that allowed unapproved third-party apps to access and read users' direct messages (DMs), even when they told users that they would not.
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Data_Breaches
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