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Google said this week it is expanding the types of data people can ask to have removed from search results, to include personal contact information like your phone number, email address or physical address. The move comes just months after Google rolled out a new policy enabling people under the age of 18 (or a parent/guardian) to request removal of their images from Google search results. Google has for years accepted requests to remove certain sensitive data such as bank account or credit card numbers from search results. In a blog post on Wednesday, Google’s Michelle Chang wrote that the company’s expanded policy now allows for the removal of additional information that may pose a risk for identity theft, such as confidential log-in credentials, email addresses and phone numbers when…

Posted by Caleb Brown, Open Source Security Team  Despite open source software’s essential role in all software built today, it’s far too easy for bad actors to circulate malicious packages that attack the systems and users running that software. Unlike mobile app stores that can scan for and reject malicious contributions, package repositories have limited resources to review the thousands of daily updates and must maintain an open model where anyone can freely contribute. As a result, malicious packages like ua-parser-js, and node-ipc are regularly uploaded to popular repositories despite their best efforts, with sometimes devastating consequences for users. Google, a member of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), is proud to support the OpenSSF’s Package Analysis project, which is a welcome step toward helping secure the open source packages…

Posted by Steve Kafka and Khawaja Shams, Android Security and Privacy Team Providing a safe experience to billions of users continues to be one of the highest priorities for Google Play. Last year we introduced multiple privacy focused features, enhanced our protections against bad apps and developers, and improved SDK data safety. In addition, Google Play Protect continues to scan billions of installed apps each day across billions of devices to keep people safe from malware and unwanted software. We continue to enhance our machine learning systems and review processes, and in 2021 we blocked 1.2 million policy violating apps from being published on Google Play, preventing billions of harmful installations. We also continued in our efforts to combat malicious and spammy developers, banning 190k bad accounts in 2021. In…

When KrebsOnSecurity recently explored how cybercriminals were using hacked email accounts at police departments worldwide to obtain warrantless Emergency Data Requests (EDRs) from social media firms and technology providers, many security experts called it a fundamentally unfixable problem. But don’t tell that to Matt Donahue, a former FBI agent who recently quit the agency to launch a startup that aims to help tech companies do a better job screening out phony law enforcement data requests — in part by assigning trustworthiness or “credit ratings” to law enforcement authorities worldwide. A sample Kodex dashboard. Image: Kodex.us. Donahue is co-founder of Kodex, a company formed in February 2021 that builds security portals designed to help tech companies “manage information requests from government agencies who contact them, and to securely transfer data &…

KrebsOnSecurity recently reviewed a copy of the private chat messages between members of the LAPSUS$ cybercrime group in the week leading up to the arrest of its most active members last month. The logs show LAPSUS$ breached T-Mobile multiple times in March, stealing source code for a range of company projects. T-Mobile says no customer or government information was stolen in the intrusion. LAPSUS$ is known for stealing data and then demanding a ransom not to publish or sell it. But the leaked chats indicate this mercenary activity was of little interest to the tyrannical teenage leader of LAPSUS$, whose obsession with stealing and leaking proprietary computer source code from the world’s largest tech companies ultimately led to the group’s undoing. From its inception in December 2021 until its implosion…

Conti — one of the most ruthless and successful Russian ransomware groups — publicly declared during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that it would refrain from targeting healthcare providers. But new information confirms this pledge was always a lie, and that Conti has launched more than 200 attacks against hospitals and other healthcare facilities since first surfacing in 2018 under its earlier name, “Ryuk.” On April 13, Microsoft said it executed a legal sneak attack against Zloader, a remote access trojan and malware platform that multiple ransomware groups have used to deploy their malware inside victim networks. More specifically, Microsoft obtained a court order that allowed it to seize 65 domain names that were used to maintain the Zloader botnet. Microsoft’s civil lawsuit against Zloader names seven “John Does,”…

Posted by Tom Hennen, software engineer, BCID & GOSST  In our last two posts (1,2) we introduced a fictional example of Squirrel, Oppy, and Acme learning to SLSA and covered the basics and details of how they’d use SLSA for their organizations. Today we’ll close out the series by exploring how each organization pulls together the various solutions into a heterogeneous supply chain. As a reminder, Acme is trying to produce a container image that contains three artifacts:The Squirrel package ‘foo’The Oppy package ‘baz’A custom executable, ‘bar’, written by Acme employees.The process starts with ‘foo’ package authors triggering a build using GitHub Actions. This results in a new version of ‘foo’ (an artifact with hash ‘abc’) being pushed to the Squirrel repo along with its SLSA provenance (signed by Fulcio)…

Posted by Tom  Hennen, software engineer, BCID & GOSST  In our last post we introduced a fictional example of Squirrel, Oppy, and Acme learning to use SLSA and covered the basics of what their implementations might look like. Today we’ll cover the details: where to store attestations and policies, what policies should check, and how to handle key distribution and trust. Attestation storage Attestations play a large role in SLSA and it’s essential that consumers of artifacts know where to find the attestations for those artifacts. Co-located in repo Attestations could be colocated in the repository that hosts the artifact. This is how Squirrel plans to store attestations for packages. They even want to add support to the Squirrel CLI (e.g. acorn get-attestations foo@1.2.3). Acme really likes this approach because…

Microsoft on Tuesday released updates to fix roughly 120 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. Two of the flaws have been publicly detailed prior to this week, and one is already seeing active exploitation, according to a report from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Of particular concern this month is CVE-2022-24521, which is a “privilege escalation” vulnerability in the Windows common log file system driver. In its advisory, Microsoft said it received a report from the NSA that the flaw is under active attack. “It’s not stated how widely the exploit is being used in the wild, but it’s likely still targeted at this point and not broadly available,” assessed Dustin Childs with Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative. “Go patch your systems before that situation…

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said today it seized the website and user database for RaidForums, an extremely popular English-language cybercrime forum that sold access to more than 10 billion consumer records stolen in some of the world’s largest data breaches since 2015. The DOJ also charged the alleged administrator of RaidForums — 21-year-old Diogo Santos Coelho, of Portugal — with six criminal counts, including conspiracy, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft. The “raid” in RaidForums is a nod to the community’s humble beginnings in 2015, when it was primarily an online venue for organizing and supporting various forms of electronic harassment. According to the DOJ, that early activity included ‘raiding‘ — posting or sending an overwhelming volume of contact to a victim’s online communications medium — and…