September, 2019

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NY Payroll Company Vanishes With $35 Million

Krebs on Security

MyPayrollHR , a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted in countless people having money drained from their bank accounts and has left nearly $35 million worth of payroll and tax payments in legal limbo.

Banking 279
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The Doghouse: Crown Sterling

Schneier on Security

A decade ago, the Doghouse was a regular feature in both my email newsletter Crypto-Gram and my blog. In it, I would call out particularly egregious -- and amusing -- examples of cryptographic " snake oil.". I dropped it both because it stopped being fun and because almost everyone converged on standard cryptographic libraries, which meant standard non-snake-oil cryptography.

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Banks, Arbitrary Password Restrictions and Why They Don't Matter

Troy Hunt

Allow me to be controversial for a moment: arbitrary password restrictions on banks such as short max lengths and disallowed characters don't matter. Also, allow me to argue with myself for a moment: banks shouldn't have these restrictions in place anyway. I want to put forward cases for both arguments here because seeing both sides is important. I want to help shed some light on why this practice happens and argue pragmatically both for and against.

Banking 245
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Voice Deepfake Scams CEO out of $243,000

Adam Levin

The CEO of a UK-based energy firm lost the equivalent of $243,000 after falling for a phone scam that implemented artificial intelligence, specifically a deepfake voice. The Wall Street Journal reported that the CEO of an unnamed UK energy company received a phone call from what sounded like his boss, the CEO of a German parent company, telling him to wire €220,000 (roughly $243,000) to a bank account in Hungary.

Scams 233
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Why Giant Content Libraries Do Nothing for Your Employees’ Cyber Resilience

Many cybersecurity awareness platforms offer massive content libraries, yet they fail to enhance employees’ cyber resilience. Without structured, engaging, and personalized training, employees struggle to retain and apply key cybersecurity principles. Phished.io explains why organizations should focus on interactive, scenario-based learning rather than overwhelming employees with excessive content.

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MY TAKE: What everyone should know about the promise and pitfalls of the Internet of Things

The Last Watchdog

Internet 201
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How to enable a randomized MAC address in Android 10

Tech Republic Security

Don't let your Android's MAC address give away your location--use a Randomized MAC address instead.

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LifeWorks

More Trending

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Another Side Channel in Intel Chips

Schneier on Security

Not that serious, but interesting : In late 2011, Intel introduced a performance enhancement to its line of server processors that allowed network cards and other peripherals to connect directly to a CPU's last-level cache, rather than following the standard (and significantly longer) path through the server's main memory. By avoiding system memory, Intel's DDIO­short for Data-Direct I/O­increased input/output bandwidth and reduced latency and power consumption.

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Weekly Update 158

Troy Hunt

It's been a bit of intense country-hopping since the last update so this one is a consolidated "this week in tweets" version. I actually found it kind of interesting going back through the noteworthy incidents of the week in lieu of having original content of my own, see what you think. Given the coming schedule (and a deep, deep desire for a few days of downtime), the next one might be more of the same so I hope it resonates!

IoT 177
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Expect More Spam Calls and SIM-Card Scams: 400 Million Phone Numbers Exposed

Adam Levin

As much as I love this one friend of mine, nothing is private when we’re together. You probably have a friend like this. The relationship is really great so you stay friends despite all, but this particular friend simply cannot know something about you without sharing it with others no matter how hard you try to get them to understand it’s totally uncool. .

Scams 197
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SHARED INTEL: Here’s one way to better leverage actionable intel from the profusion of threat feeds

The Last Watchdog

Keeping track of badness on the Internet has become a thriving cottage industry unto itself. Related: ‘Cyber Pearl Harbor’ is upon us There are dozens technology giants, cybersecurity vendors, government agencies and industry consortiums that identify and blacklist IP addresses and web page URLs that are obviously being used maliciously; and hundreds more independent white hat hackers are doing much the same.

Firewall 193
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Zero Trust Mandate: The Realities, Requirements and Roadmap

The DHS compliance audit clock is ticking on Zero Trust. Government agencies can no longer ignore or delay their Zero Trust initiatives. During this virtual panel discussion—featuring Kelly Fuller Gordon, Founder and CEO of RisX, Chris Wild, Zero Trust subject matter expert at Zermount, Inc., and Principal of Cybersecurity Practice at Eliassen Group, Trey Gannon—you’ll gain a detailed understanding of the Federal Zero Trust mandate, its requirements, milestones, and deadlines.

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Yahoo data breach settlement means affected users may get $100

Tech Republic Security

If you had a Yahoo account between January 1, 2012 and December 31, 2016, you may be entitled to a bit of money.

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Before He Spammed You, this Sly Prince Stalked Your Mailbox

Krebs on Security

A reader forwarded what he briefly imagined might be a bold, if potentially costly, innovation on the old Nigerian prince scam that asks for help squirreling away millions in unclaimed fortune: It was sent via the U.S. Postal Service, with a postmarked stamp and everything. In truth these old fashioned “advance fee” or “419” scams predate email and have circulated via postal mail in various forms and countries over the years.

Scams 225
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Massive iPhone Hack Targets Uyghurs

Schneier on Security

China is being blamed for a massive surveillance operation that targeted Uyghur Muslims. This story broke in waves, the first wave being about the iPhone. Earlier this year, Google's Project Zero found a series of websites that have been using zero-day vulnerabilities to indiscriminately install malware on iPhones that would visit the site. (The vulnerabilities were patched in iOS 12.1.4, released on February 7.).

Hacking 270
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Weekly Update 156

Troy Hunt

Turns out it's actually a sunny day in Oslo today, although it's the last one I'll see here for quite some time before heading off to Denmark then other European things for the remainder of this trip. I'm talking a little about those events ( all listed on my events page ), this week's changes to EV, more data breaches and a somewhat semantic argument about the definition of "theft".

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Prevent Data Breaches With Zero-Trust Enterprise Password Management

Keeper Security is transforming cybersecurity for people and organizations around the world. Keeper’s affordable and easy-to-use solutions are built on a foundation of zero-trust and zero-knowledge security to protect every user on every device. Our next-generation privileged access management solution deploys in minutes and seamlessly integrates with any tech stack to prevent breaches, reduce help desk costs and ensure compliance.

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If You Have to Ask How Much a Data Breach Costs, You Can’t Afford One

Adam Levin

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NEW TECH: Baffin Bay Networks takes a ‘cloud-first’ approach to securing web applications

The Last Watchdog

Hear about the smart toaster that got attacked three times within an hour after its IP address first appeared on the Internet? That experiment conducted by a reporter for The Atlantic crystalizes the seemingly intractable security challenge businesses face today. Related: How 5G will escalate DDoS attacks Caught in the pull of digital transformation , companies are routing ever more core operations and services through the Internet, or, more precisely, through IP addresses, of one kind or anothe

DDOS 171
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A new type of DDoS attack can amplify attack strength by more than 15,300%

Tech Republic Security

By abusing a little-known multicast protocol, attackers can launch DDoS attacks of immense power, but there may be an easy fix.

DDOS 167
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‘Satori’ IoT Botnet Operator Pleads Guilty

Krebs on Security

A 21-year-old man from Vancouver, Wash. has pleaded guilty to federal hacking charges tied to his role in operating the “ Satori ” botnet, a crime machine powered by hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices that was built to conduct massive denial-of-service attacks targeting Internet service providers, online gaming platforms and Web hosting companies.

IoT 214
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Optimizing The Modern Developer Experience with Coder

Many software teams have migrated their testing and production workloads to the cloud, yet development environments often remain tied to outdated local setups, limiting efficiency and growth. This is where Coder comes in. In our 101 Coder webinar, you’ll explore how cloud-based development environments can unlock new levels of productivity. Discover how to transition from local setups to a secure, cloud-powered ecosystem with ease.

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Supply-Chain Security and Trust

Schneier on Security

The United States government's continuing disagreement with the Chinese company Huawei underscores a much larger problem with computer technologies in general: We have no choice but to trust them completely, and it's impossible to verify that they're trustworthy. Solving this problem ­ which is increasingly a national security issue ­ will require us to both make major policy changes and invent new technologies.

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Weekly Update 155

Troy Hunt

From the emerging spring to the impending autumn, I'm back in Oslo at the beginning of another series of European events that'll take me across Norway, Denmark, Hungary and Switzerland. This week's update comes from under the glow of a warm outdoor heater at ridiculous o'clock as my sleep cycle keeps me making early starts. But it's all transient and by this time next month I'll be back to a very warm, very familiar Aussie landscape.

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Court Rules in Favor of Mining LinkedIn User Data

Adam Levin

A federal appellate court ruled that mining and aggregating user data publicly posted to social media sites is allowable by law. In an opinion released earlier this month, the 9th Circuit U.S.Court of Appeals upheld an injunction against employment-centric social network LinkedIn from blocking access to hiQ, a data mining company that sells aggregated user information. .

Passwords 158
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SHARED INTEL: Mobile apps are riddled with security flaws, many of which go unremediated

The Last Watchdog

The convergence of DevOps and SecOps is steadily gaining traction in the global marketplace. Some fresh evidence of this encouraging trend comes to us by way of shared intelligence from WhiteHat Security. Related: The tie between DevOps and SecOps. Organizations that are all-in leveraging microservices to speed-up application development, on the DevOps side of the house, have begun acknowledging the importance of incorporating SecOps along the way.

Mobile 170
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The Importance of User Roles and Permissions in Cybersecurity Software

How many people would you trust with your house keys? Chances are, you have a handful of trusted friends and family members who have an emergency copy, but you definitely wouldn’t hand those out too freely. You have stuff that’s worth protecting—and the more people that have access to your belongings, the higher the odds that something will go missing.

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Small businesses underestimate financial damage of cyberattacks

Tech Republic Security

The average breach causes an average of $149,000 in damages, yet most small-to-medium-sized businesses thought cyberattacks would cost them under $10,000, survey reports.

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Patch Tuesday, September 2019 Edition

Krebs on Security

Microsoft today issued security updates to plug some 80 security holes in various flavors of its Windows operating systems and related software. The software giant assigned a “critical” rating to almost a quarter of those vulnerabilities, meaning they could be used by malware or miscreants to hijack vulnerable systems with little or no interaction on the part of the user.

Software 174
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Russians Hack FBI Comms System

Schneier on Security

Yahoo News reported that the Russians have successfully targeted an FBI communications system: American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams. Officials also feared that the Russians may have devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications, including hacking into computers not connected to the internet.

Hacking 261
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Weekly Update 154

Troy Hunt

How's that for a setting in this week's video? ?? First day of spring here which aligned with a father's day on the water: May all your father’s days be full of fun and laughter ?? pic.twitter.com/pN1dQ38cDr — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) September 1, 2019 Back on business as usual, there's the SIM hijacking issue with Jack Dorsey's Twitter account, more data breaches and joyously, the HIBP API being back in full swing with the 500 subscription limit issue on Azure's APIM now being overcome.

CISO 166
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IDC Analyst Report: The Open Source Blind Spot Putting Businesses at Risk

In a recent study, IDC found that 64% of organizations said they were already using open source in software development with a further 25% planning to in the next year. Most organizations are unaware of just how much open-source code is used and underestimate their dependency on it. As enterprises grow the use of open-source software, they face a new challenge: understanding the scope of open-source software that's being used throughout the organization and the corresponding exposure.

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Vendor Risk

Adam Levin

Insider risk, supply chain vulnerability and vendor risk all boil down to the same thing: the more people have access to your data, the more vulnerable it is to being leaked or breached. This summer brought an interesting twist to that straight-forward situation: Can data leaked by an employee or a contractor be a good thing? In July, a Belgian contractor who had been hired to transcribe Google Home recordings shared several of them with news outlet VRT.

Risk 158
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NEW TECH: Breakthrough ‘homomorphic-like’ encryption protects data in-use, without penalties

The Last Watchdog

Homomorphic encryption has long been something of a Holy Grail in cryptography. Related: Post-quantum cryptography on the horizon For decades, some of our smartest mathematicians and computer scientists have struggled to derive a third way to keep data encrypted — not just the two classical ways, at rest and in transit. The truly astounding feat, aka homomorphic encryption, would be to keep data encrypted while it is being actively used by an application to run computations.

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Why employees still fall for phishing emails

Tech Republic Security

Nearly half of office workers said they had their data compromised. Here's why they keep falling for phishing scams.

Phishing 167
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Threat Modeling Building Blocks

Adam Shostack

Threat modeling isn’t one task — its a collection of tasks that build on each other to produce more valuable insights. One of the values of the four question frame is that it lets us reduce things into smaller, more assessable building blocks. And in that vein, there are a couple of new, short (4-page), interesting papers from a team at KU Leuven including: Knowledge is Power: Systematic Reuse of Privacy Knowledge for Threat Elicitation.

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Beware of Pixels & Trackers on U.S. Healthcare Websites

The healthcare industry has massively adopted web tracking tools, including pixels and trackers. Tracking tools on user-authenticated and unauthenticated web pages can access personal health information (PHI) such as IP addresses, medical record numbers, home and email addresses, appointment dates, or other info provided by users on pages and thus can violate HIPAA Rules that govern the Use of Online Tracking Technologies by HIPAA Covered Entities and Business Associates.