The Wall Street Journal reports that Intel has a facility in Costa Rica where it stores legacy hardware for security research.
Intel’s issue reflects a wider concern: Legacy technology can introduce cybersecurity weaknesses. Tech makers constantly improve their products to take advantage of speed and power increases, but customers don’t always upgrade at the same pace. This creates a long tail of old products that remain in widespread use, vulnerable to attacks.
Andrew Orr joins host Kelly Guimont to discuss security tips for traveling, and some good things to check when you get to your Turkey Day Destination.
Andrew Orr and host Kelly Guimont discuss the abundance of security news this week including some hardware issues and This Week in Data Breaches.
U.S. regulators have approved a rule to require banks to report major cyber incidents within 36 hours.
The rule, dubbed the Computer-Security Incident Notification Requirements for Banking Organizations and Their Bank Service Providers, was cemented by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. There is currently no specific window that banks must repot such incident to the agencies in question.
TechCrunch reports that California Pizza Kitchen suffered a data breach in September. The SSNs of over 100,000 employees were leaked as a result.
While CPK didn’t confirm how many people are impacted by the breach, a notification from the Maine attorney general’s office reported a total of 103,767 current and former employees — including eight Maine residents — are affected. CPK employed around 14,000 people as of 2017, suggesting the bulk of those affected are former employees.
There’s a new streaming service in town and it’s called CyberD TV. It aims to help the public stay safe online with cybersecurity training.
In a joint advisory issued on Wednesday, the U.S. is warning that Iranian state-backed hackers are targeting infrastructure companies with ransomware.
The Iranian government-sponsored APT actors are actively targeting a broad range of victims across multiple U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, including the Transportation Sector and the Healthcare and Public Health Sector, as well as Australian organizations. FBI, CISA, ACSC, and NCSC assess the actors are focused on exploiting known vulnerabilities rather than targeting specific sectors.
GitHub has fixed several flaws with npm packages that leaked private names and let attackers publish new versions of a package they didn’t have rights to.
The data leak was identified by GitHub on October 26th and by the 29th, all records containing private package names were deleted from the npm’s replication database. Although, GitHub does warn that despite this, the replicate.npmjs.com service is consumed by third parties who may, therefore, continue to retain a copy or “may have replicated the data elsewhere.”
AT&T Alien Labs discovered malware it dubs BotenaGo. It affects millions of routers and Internet of Things devices found with smart homes. The “devastating” part comes from the fact that it uses over 30 separate exploits due to insecure devices.
The BotenaGo malware starts by initializing global infection counters that will be printed to the screen, informing the hacker about total successful infections. It then looks for the ‘dlrs’ folder in which to load shell scripts files. A loaded script will be concatenated as ‘echo -ne %s >> ‘. If the ‘dlrs’ folder is missing, the malware will stop and exit at this point. For the last and most important preparation, the malware calls the function ‘scannerInitExploits’, which initiates the malware attack surface by mapping all offensive functions with its relevant string that represent the targeted system.
ETH Zurich reports that researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Qualcomm Technologies found flaws within DRAM chips. The article I’m linking to is more of an announcement; ETH Zurich tells me the full results will be presented at IEEE in 2022.
It means that by repeatedly activating – or “hammering” – a memory row (the “aggressor”), an attacker can induce bit errors in a neighbouring row, also called the “victim” row. That bit error can then, in principle, be exploited to gain access to restricted areas inside the computer system – without relying on any software vulnerability.
Hackers took over an FBI server over the weekend, sending thousands of fake cyberattack warnings. The agency says no personal information or data was affected.
The agency said it has fixed the software vulnerability that allowed the attack.
The fake emails originated from an FBI-operated server, which was dedicated to pushing notifications to the Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal (LEEP), which the FBI uses to communicate with state and local agencies. The compromised server was not part of the FBI’s corporate email service, the FBI added.
Andrew Orr and Jeff Butts join host Kelly Guimont to discuss security news, This Week in Data Breaches, and new uses for Precise Location data.
Google’s Threat Analysis Group discovered a new macOS implant that security researcher Patrick Wardle dubbed OSX.CDDS. It targets “visitors to Hong Kong websites for a media outlet and a prominent pro-democracy labor and political group.”
Notable features for this backdoor include: victim device fingerprinting, screen capture, file download/upload, executing terminal commands, audio recording, keylogging.
A report from India Today shares the story of how thieves tricked an Apple user to steal his credentials in order to unlock the iPhone they stole.
Vedant narrated his ordeal on Twitter and urged users to be aware of the types of attacks that can be used to extract sensitive information from users. He revealed that the first thing he did after losing his phone was log in to the Find My app with his Apple ID using his MacBook and try to get the phone’s exact location through the Find My app.
Classic phishing attack.
Robinhood suffered a data breach recently through a social engineering attack on a customer support agent.
At this time, we understand that the unauthorized party obtained a list of email addresses for approximately five million people, and full names for a different group of approximately two million people.
Andrew Orr joins host Kelly Guimont to discuss some good Security Friday news, an update on previous news, and a gift idea for everyone.
A report on Thursday claims that hackers were able to launder US$10 million on Twitch through the platform’s Bits currency.
Led by Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, vpnMentor’s research team discovered a data breach from Phlebotomy Training Specialists.
Unfortunately, the company was storing the complete records of 10,000s of students nationwide on a single, open cloud account. In this case, Phlebotomy Training Specialists was using an Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 bucket to store data it collected from students, staff members, and people applying to its courses. S3 buckets are an increasingly popular enterprise cloud storage solution. However, users must set up their security protocols manually to protect the data stored therein.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will require all federal agencies to patch security flaws in their systems.
Fake job ads are on the rise, a report says on Tuesday. Scammers use peoples’ Social Security Numbers to sign up for unemployment benefits.
That means scammers may need help from their victims — and sometimes they go to elaborate lengths to mislead them. Some fraudsters recreate companies’ hiring websites. One fake job application site uses Spirit Airlines’ photos, text, font and color code. The phony site asks applicants to upload a copy of both sides of their driver’s license at the outset of the process and sends them an email seeking more information from a web address that resembles Spirit’s, with an extra “i” (spiiritairline.com).
Andrew Orr joins host Kelly Guimont to discuss Security Friday news and updates including who can get into your phone now, and a massive bug bounty.
Security researcher Jeremiah Fowler together with the WebsitePlanet research team found an unprotected database belonging to Deep6. The records appear to contain data of those based in the United States.
Update: Deep6 reached out and said the news is misleading, saying “In August, a security researcher accessed a test environment that contained dummy data from MIT’s Medical Information Mart of Intensive Care (MIMIC) system, an industry standard source for de-identified health-related test data. To confirm, no real patient data or records were included in this ephemeral test environment, and it was completely isolated from our production systems.”
Meanwhile, according to WebsitePlanet, Mr. Fowler said, “I sent 3 follow up emails on Aug 11, Aug 12, Aug 23. No one has ever replied since the first message on Aug 10th. I validated that the doctor’s names were real individuals by searching obscure names (see screenshot). This is highly unusual in my experience to use real individuals’ data in a ‘dummy environment’ under any circumstances. Because no one replied, we added our disclaimer that we are highlighting that no patient data appeared in plain text, the records were “medical related”, and we never implied any wrongdoing or risk.”
North American Dental Management suffered a data breach between March 31 and April 1, 2021. It happened as the result of phishing. This group provides administrative and technical support services for Professional Dental Alliance (PDA) offices.
PDA said that it had not found any evidence of any actual misuse of personal information and that its investigation of the matter indicates that the attack was limited to email credential harvesting.
The threat actor did not access PDA’s patient electronic dental record or dental images; however, the Alliance found that some sensitive personal information may have been present in the compromised email accounts.
The breach was reported to the DHS’s Office for Civil Rights, impacting 125,760 patients in Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Texas and Tennessee.
Security researcher Gerhard Wagner found a double-spend bug in Polygon’s Plasma bridge. The company awarded Mr. Wagner a record US$2 million for reporting this critical vulnerability.
In total, it is possible to create 14×16 = 224 different encodings for the same raw path. A malicious user can leverage the issue to create alternative exits for the same burn transaction and perform double spends on the Polygon network.
