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Dear Readers, this has been long overdue, but at last I give you a more responsive, mobile-friendly version of KrebsOnSecurity. We tried to keep the visual changes to a minimum and focus on a simple theme that presents information in a straightforward, easy-to-read format. Please bear with us over the next few days as we hunt down the gremlins in the gears. We were shooting for responsive (fast) and uncluttered. Hopefully, we achieved that and this new design will render well in whatever device you use to view it. If something looks amiss, please don’t hesitate to drop a note in the comments below. NB: KrebsOnSecurity has not changed any of its advertising practices: The handful of ads we run are still image-only creatives that are vetted by me and…

On Jan. 11, Ubiquiti Inc. [NYSE:UI] — a major vendor of cloud-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as routers, network video recorders and security cameras — disclosed that a breach involving a third-party cloud provider had exposed customer account credentials. Now a source who participated in the response to that breach alleges Ubiquiti massively downplayed a “catastrophic” incident to minimize the hit to its stock price, and that the third-party cloud provider claim was a fabrication. A security professional at Ubiquiti who helped the company respond to the two-month breach beginning in December 2020 contacted KrebsOnSecurity after raising his concerns with both Ubiquiti’s whistleblower hotline and with European data protection authorities. The source — we’ll call him Adam — spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by…

New data suggests someone has compromised more than 21,000 Microsoft Exchange Server email systems worldwide and infected them with malware that invokes both KrebsOnSecurity and Yours Truly by name. Let’s just get this out of the way right now: It wasn’t me. The Shadowserver Foundation, a nonprofit that helps network owners identify and fix security threats, says it has found 21,248 different Exchange servers which appear to be compromised by a backdoor and communicating with brian[.]krebsonsecurity[.]top (NOT a safe domain, hence the hobbling). Shadowserver has been tracking wave after wave of attacks targeting flaws in Exchange that Microsoft addressed earlier this month in an emergency patch release. The group looks for attacks on Exchange systems using a combination of active Internet scans and “honeypots” — systems left vulnerable to attack…

Posted by Sudhi Herle and Jason Wong, Android Team When the Pixel 3 launched in 2018, it had a new tamper-resistant hardware enclave called Titan M. In addition to being a root-of-trust for Pixel software and firmware, it also enabled tamper-resistant key storage for Android Apps using StrongBox. StrongBox is an implementation of the Keymaster HAL that resides in a hardware security module. It is an important security enhancement for Android devices and paved the way for us to consider features that were previously not possible. StrongBox and tamper-resistant hardware are becoming important requirements for emerging user features, including: Digital keys (car, home, office) Mobile Driver’s License (mDL), National ID, ePassports eMoney solutions (for example, Wallet) All these features need to run on tamper-resistant hardware to protect the integrity of…

A phishing attack last week gave attackers access to email and files at the California State Controller’s Office (SCO), an agency responsible for handling more than $100 billion in public funds each year. The phishers had access for more than 24 hours, and sources tell KrebsOnSecurity the intruders used that time to steal Social Security numbers and sensitive files on thousands of state workers, and to send targeted phishing messages to at least 9,000 other workers and their contacts. A notice of breach posted by the California State Controller’s Office. In a “Notice of Data Breach” message posted on Saturday, Mar. 20, the Controller’s Office said that for more than 24 hours starting on the afternoon of March 18 attackers had access to the email records of an employee in…

Remember Norse Corp., the company behind the interactive “pew-pew” cyber attack map shown in the image below? Norse imploded rather suddenly in 2016 following a series of managerial missteps and funding debacles. Now, the founders of Norse have launched a new company with a somewhat different vision: RedTorch, which for the past two years has marketed a mix of services to high end celebrity clients, including spying and anti-spying tools and services. A snapshot of Norse’s semi-live attack map, circa Jan. 2016. Norse’s attack map was everywhere for several years, and even became a common sight in the “brains” of corporate security operations centers worldwide. Even if the data that fueled the maps was not particularly useful, the images never failed to enthrall visitors viewing them on room-sized screens. “In…

Posted by Harshvardhan Sharma, Information Security Engineer, Google We first announced the GCP VRP Prize in 2019 to encourage security researchers to focus on the security of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), in turn helping us make GCP more secure for our users, customers, and the internet at large. In the first iteration of the prize, we awarded $100,000 to the winning write-up about a security vulnerability in GCP. We also announced that we would reward the top 6 submissions in 2020 and increased the total prize money to $313,337.2020 turned out to be an amazing year for the Google Vulnerability Reward Program. We received many high-quality vulnerability reports from our talented and prolific vulnerability researchers. Vulnerability reports received year-over-yearThis trend was reflected in the submissions we received for the GCP VRP…

If you sell Web-based software for a living and ship code that references an unregistered domain name, you are asking for trouble. But when the same mistake is made by a Fortune 500 company, the results can range from costly to disastrous. Here’s the story of one such goof committed by Fiserv [NASDAQ:FISV], a $6 billion firm that provides online banking software and other technology solutions to thousands of financial institutions. In November 2020, KrebsOnSecurity heard from security researcher Abraham Vegh, who noticed something odd while inspecting an email from his financial institution. Vegh could see the message from his bank referenced a curious domain: defaultinstitution.com. A quick search of WHOIS registration records showed the domain was unregistered. Wondering whether he might receive email communications to that address if he…

SMS text messages were already the weakest link securing just about anything online, mainly because there are tens of thousands of people (many of them low-paid mobile store employees) who can be tricked or bribed into swapping control over a mobile phone number to someone else. Now we’re learning about an entire ecosystem of companies that anyone could use to silently intercept text messages intended for other mobile users. Security researcher “Lucky225” worked with Vice.com’s Joseph Cox to intercept Cox’s incoming text messages with his permission. Lucky225 showed how anyone could do the same after creating an account at a service called Sakari, a company that helps celebrities and businesses do SMS marketing and mass messaging. The “how they did it” was sickeningly simple. It cost just $16, and there…

Posted by Ryan Hurst, Product Management, Google Trust ServicesEncryption is a fundamental building block when you’re on a mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible with strong security and privacy. This is why a little over four years ago we created Google Trust Services—our publicly trusted Certificate Authority (CA).The road to becoming a publicly trusted certificate authority is a long one - especially if the certificates you issue will be used by some of the most visited sites on the internet. When we started on this journey, our goal was that within five years our root certificates would be embedded in enough devices that we could do a single transition to our long-term root certificates. There are still a large number of active used devices that…