Troy Hunt

NOVEMBER 22, 2019

Until this month, I'd never heard of People Data Labs (PDL). I'd certainly heard of the sector they operate in - "Data Enrichment" - but I'd never heard of the company itself. I've become more familiar with this sector over recent years due to the frequency with which it's been suffering data breaches that have ultimately landed in my inbox. For example, there's Dun & Bradstreet's NetProspex which leaked 33M records in 2017 , Exactis who had 132M records breached last year and the Apollo dat

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Data breaches Technology Software Accountability 360

Krebs on Security

NOVEMBER 22, 2019

A ransomware outbreak has besieged a Wisconsin based IT company that provides cloud data hosting, security and access management to more than 100 nursing homes across the United States. The ongoing attack is preventing these care centers from accessing crucial patient medical records, and the IT company’s owner says she fears this incident could soon lead not only to the closure of her business, but also to the untimely demise of some patients.

Ransomware 354

Ransomware Computers and Electronics Healthcare Data breaches 354

Adam Levin

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

One terabyte of data belonging to a major hotel booking platform was found leaked online. A huge trove of customer data belonging to Gekko Group was found online in an unsecured format. The data contained a wide array of records, including full names, credit card details, client login information, email addresses, home addresses and hotel reservations.

B2B 295

B2B Spyware VPN Phishing 295

Schneier on Security

AUGUST 1, 2019

This article points out that Facebook's planned content moderation scheme will result in an encryption backdoor into WhatsApp: In Facebook's vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms. These algorithms will be continually updated from a central cloud service, but will run locally on the user's device, scanning each cleartext message before it is sent and each encrypted message after it is dec

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Encryption Manufacturing Mobile Government 139

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Passwords

The Last Watchdog

MARCH 28, 2019

A couple of high-profile distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks will surely go down in history as watershed events – each for different reasons. Related: IoT botnets now available for economical DDoS blasts. In March 2013, several impossibly massive waves of nuisance requests – peaking as high as 300 gigabytes per second— swamped Spamhaus , knocking the anti-spam organization off line for extended periods.

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Adam Shostack

FEBRUARY 9, 2019

The Seattle Times has a story today about how “ 50 years ago today, the first 747 took off and changed aviation.” It’s true. The 747 was a marvel of engineering and luxury. The book by Joe Sutter is a great story of engineering leadership. For an upcoming flight, I paid extra to reserve an upper deck seat before the last of the passenger-carrying Queens of the Skies retires.

Engineering 223

Engineering Mobile Government 223

Krebs on Security

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

Tiny hidden spy cameras are a common sight at ATMs that have been tampered with by crooks who specialize in retrofitting the machines with card skimmers. But until this past week I’d never heard of hidden cameras being used at gas pumps in tandem with Bluetooth-based card skimming devices. Apparently, I’m not alone. “I believe this is the first time I’ve seen a camera on a gas pump with a Bluetooth card skimmer,” said Detective Matt Jogodka of the Las Vegas Police Departm

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Troy Hunt

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

When I first started writing code a few decades ago, it was a rather bland affair involving a basic text editor and physical books for reference. I didn't have an opportunity to create anything usable by others until years later and perhaps most importantly in the context of this blog post, I didn't have anyone in my family able to teach me about coding.

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Software 295

Krebs on Security

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

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

Banking Financial Services Accountability Insurance 279

Krebs on Security

JULY 24, 2019

Nearly three dozen journalists at a broad range of major publications have been targeted by a far-right group that maintains a Deep Web database listing the personal information of people who threaten their views. This group specializes in encouraging others to harass those targeted by their ire, and has claimed responsibility for dozens of bomb threats and “swatting” incidents, where police are tricked into visiting potentially deadly force on the target’s address.

Mobile 279

Mobile Government 279

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Software

Krebs on Security

MAY 24, 2019

The Web site for Fortune 500 real estate title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. [ NYSE:FAF ] leaked hundreds of millions of documents related to mortgage deals going back to 2003, until notified this week by KrebsOnSecurity. The digitized records — including bank account numbers and statements, mortgage and tax records, Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts, and drivers license images — were available without authentication to anyone with a Web browser.

Insurance 279

Insurance Banking Identity Theft Scams 279

Krebs on Security

MARCH 21, 2019

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees — in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Facebook says an ongoing investigation has so far found no indication that employees have abused access to this data. Facebook is probing the causes of a series of security failures in which employees built applications that logged unencrypted password data for Facebook users and stored it

Passwords 56

Passwords Engineering Accountability Advertising 56

Krebs on Security

MAY 22, 2019

Some of the most convincing email phishing and malware attacks come disguised as nastygrams from a law firm. Such scams typically notify the recipient that he/she is being sued, and instruct them to review the attached file and respond within a few days — or else. Here’s a look at a recent spam campaign that peppered more than 100,000 business email addresses with fake legal threats harboring malware.

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Phishing Antivirus Scams Malware 279

Troy Hunt

JANUARY 16, 2019

Many people will land on this page after learning that their email address has appeared in a data breach I've called "Collection #1". Most of them won't have a tech background or be familiar with the concept of credential stuffing so I'm going to write this post for the masses and link out to more detailed material for those who want to go deeper. Let's start with the raw numbers because that's the headline, then I'll drill down into where it's from and what it's composed of.

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Data breaches Passwords Password Management Accountability 280

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Krebs on Security

JANUARY 3, 2019

A new phone-based phishing scam that spoofs Apple Inc. is likely to fool quite a few people. It starts with an automated call that display’s Apple’s logo, address and real phone number, warning about a data breach at the company. The scary part is that if the recipient is an iPhone user who then requests a call back from Apple’s legitimate customer support Web page, the fake call gets indexed in the iPhone’s “recent calls” list as a previous call from the legi

Scams 279

Scams Phishing Cyber Risk Engineering 279

Troy Hunt

JUNE 10, 2019

Back in 2013, I was beginning to get the sense that data breaches were becoming a big thing. The prevalence of them seemed to be really ramping up as was the impact they were having on those of us that found ourselves in them, myself included. Increasingly, I was writing about what I thought was a pretty fascinating segment of the infosec industry; password reuse across Gawker and Twitter resulting in a breach of the former sending Acai berry spam via the latter.

Data breaches 278

Data breaches Passwords InfoSec Accountability 278

Schneier on Security

MARCH 27, 2019

A university study confirmed the obvious: if you pay a random bunch of freelance programmers a small amount of money to write security software, they're not going to do a very good job at it. In an experiment that involved 43 programmers hired via the Freelancer.com platform, University of Bonn academics have discovered that developers tend to take the easy way out and write code that stores user passwords in an unsafe manner.

Passwords 279

Passwords Technology Software 279

Schneier on Security

MAY 6, 2019

I don't have a lot of good news for you. The truth is there's nothing we can do to protect our data from being stolen by cybercriminals and others. Ten years ago, I could have given you all sorts of advice about using encryption, not sending information over email, securing your web connections, and a host of other things­ -- but most of that doesn't matter anymore.

Identity Theft 278

Identity Theft Passwords Password Management Authentication 278

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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.

Cybersecurity

Krebs on Security

AUGUST 22, 2019

On Tuesday of this week, one of the more popular underground stores peddling credit and debit card data stolen from hacked merchants announced a blockbuster new sale: More than 5.3 million new accounts belonging to cardholders from 35 U.S. states. Multiple sources now tell KrebsOnSecurity that the card data came from compromised gas pumps, coffee shops and restaurants operated by Hy-Vee , an Iowa-based company that operates a chain of more than 245 supermarkets throughout the Midwestern United S

Energy and Utilities 276

Energy and Utilities Retail Data breaches Marketing 276

Krebs on Security

APRIL 17, 2019

I’m not a huge fan of stories about stories, or those that explore the ins and outs of reporting a breach. But occasionally I feel obligated to publish such accounts when companies respond to a breach report in such a way that it’s crystal clear they wouldn’t know what to do with a data breach if it bit them in the nose, let alone festered unmolested in some dark corner of their operations.

Data breaches 277

Data breaches Phishing Retail Antivirus 277

Schneier on Security

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

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Krebs on Security

MARCH 8, 2019

Most people who have frozen their credit files with Equifax have been issued a numeric Personal Identification Number (PIN) which is supposed to be required before a freeze can be lifted or thawed. Unfortunately, if you don’t already have an account at the credit bureau’s new myEquifax portal , it may be simple for identity thieves to lift an existing credit freeze at Equifax and bypass the PIN armed with little more than your, name, Social Security number and birthday.

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Accountability Identity Theft Passwords Authentication 276

Advertiser: Revenera

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.

Risk

Schneier on Security

JUNE 28, 2019

Today is my last day at IBM. If you've been following along, IBM bought my startup Resilient Systems in Spring 2016. Since then, I have been with IBM, holding the nicely ambiguous title of "Special Advisor." As of the end of the month, I will be back on my own. I will continue to write and speak, and do the occasional consulting job. I will continue to teach at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Technology 275

Technology 275

Schneier on Security

MARCH 29, 2019

This is an interesting story of a serious vulnerability in a Huawei driver that Microsoft found. The vulnerability is similar in style to the NSA's DOUBLEPULSAR that was leaked by the Shadow Brokers -- believed to be the Russian government -- and it's obvious that this attack copied that technique. What is less clear is whether the vulnerability -- which has been fixed -- was put into the Huwei driver accidentally or on purpose.

Government 276

Government Malware 276

Schneier on Security

APRIL 22, 2019

This is the best analysis of the software causes of the Boeing 737 MAX disasters that I have read. Technically this is safety and not security; there was no attacker. But the fields are closely related and there are a lot of lessons for IoT security -- and the security of complex socio-technical systems in general -- in here.

Software 275

Software IoT 275

Krebs on Security

APRIL 26, 2019

A peer-to-peer (P2P) communications technology built into millions of security cameras and other consumer electronics includes several critical security flaws that expose the devices to eavesdropping, credential theft and remote compromise, new research has found. A map showing the distribution of some 2 million iLinkP2P-enabled devices that are vulnerable to eavesdropping, password theft and possibly remote compromise, according to new research.

IoT 275

IoT Firewall Manufacturing Computers and Electronics 275

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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.

Healthcare

Schneier on Security

MAY 17, 2019

In March, Adi Shamir -- that's the "S" in RSA -- was denied a US visa to attend the RSA Conference. He's Israeli. This month, British citizen Ross Anderson couldn't attend an awards ceremony in DC because of visa issues. (You can listen to his recorded acceptance speech.) I've heard of at least one other prominent cryptographer who is in the same boat.

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Schneier on Security

MARCH 20, 2019

This isn't a security story, but it easily could have been. Last Saturday, Zipcar had a system outage : "an outage experienced by a third party telecommunications vendor disrupted connections between the company's vehicles and its reservation software.". That didn't just mean people couldn't get cars they reserved. Sometimes is meant they couldn't get the cars they were already driving to work: Andrew Jones of Roxbury was stuck on hold with customer service for at least a half-hour while he and

Telecommunications 274

Telecommunications Software 274

Krebs on Security

JANUARY 17, 2019

My inbox and Twitter messages positively lit up today with people forwarding stories from Wired and other publications about a supposedly new trove of nearly 773 million unique email addresses and 21 million unique passwords that were posted to a hacking forum. A story in The Guardian breathlessly dubbed it “the largest collection ever of breached data found.” But in an interview with the apparent seller, KrebsOnSecurity learned that it is not even close to the largest gathering of s

Passwords 54

Passwords Accountability Hacking Password Management 54

Schneier on Security

JULY 24, 2019

Yesterday, Attorney General William Barr gave a major speech on encryption policy -- what is commonly known as "going dark." Speaking at Fordham University in New York, he admitted that adding backdoors decreases security but that it is worth it. Some hold this view dogmatically, claiming that it is technologically impossible to provide lawful access without weakening security against unlawful access.

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Encryption Telecommunications Risk Government 273

Speaker: Blackberry, OSS Consultants, & Revenera

Software is complex, which makes threats to the software supply chain more real every day. 64% of organizations have been impacted by a software supply chain attack and 60% of data breaches are due to unpatched software vulnerabilities. In the U.S. alone, cyber losses totaled $10.3 billion in 2022. All of these stats beg the question, “Do you know what’s in your software?

Cybersecurity