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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
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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
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https://thehackernews.com/2019/11/zonealarm-forum-data-breach.html
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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
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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
|
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
|
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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