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John Bernard, a pseudonym used by a convicted thief and con artist named John Clifton Davies who’s fleeced dozens of technology startups out of an estimated $30 million, appears to have reinvented himself again after being exposed in a recent investigative series published here. Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Davies/Bernard is now posing as John Cavendish and head of a new “private office” called Hempton Business Management LLP. John Davies is a U.K. man who absconded from justice before being convicted on multiple counts of fraud in 2015. Prior to his conviction, Davies served 16 months in jail before being cleared of murdering his wife on their honeymoon in India. Davies’ fraud convictions stemmed from a series of U.K. companies he set up supposedly to help troubled companies reorganize their debt…

Posted by Priya Wadhwa, Jake Sanders, Google Open Source Security TeamWith over 16 million pulls per month, Google’s `distroless` base images are widely used and depended on by large projects like Kubernetes and Istio. These minimal images don’t include common tools like shells or package managers, making their attack surface (and download size!) smaller than traditional base images such as `ubuntu` or `alpine`. Even with this additional protection, users could still fall prey to typosquatting attacks, or receive a malicious image if the distroless build process was compromised – making users vulnerable to accidentally using a malicious image instead of the actual distroless image. This problem isn’t unique to distroless images – until now, there just hasn’t been an easy way to verify that images are what they claim to…

Phishers targeting Microsoft Office 365 users increasingly are turning to specialized links that take users to their organization’s own email login page. After a user logs in, the link prompts them to install a malicious but innocuously-named app that gives the attacker persistent, password-free access to any of the user’s emails and files, both of which are then plundered to launch malware and phishing scams against others. These attacks begin with an emailed link that when clicked loads not a phishing site but the user’s actual Office 365 login page — whether that be at microsoft.com or their employer’s domain. After logging in, the user might see a prompt that looks something like this: These malicious apps allow attackers to bypass multi-factor authentication, because they are approved by the user…

Alex Gough, Engineer, Chrome Platform Security TeamChrome 90 for Windows adopts Hardware-enforced Stack Protection, a mitigation technology to make the exploitation of security bugs more difficult for attackers. This is supported by Windows 20H1 (December Update) or later, running on processors with Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) such as Intel 11th Gen or AMD Zen 3 CPUs. With this mitigation the processor maintains a new, protected, stack of valid return addresses (a shadow stack). This improves security by making exploits more difficult to write. However, it may affect stability if software that loads itself into Chrome is not compatible with the mitigation. Below we describe some exploitation techniques that are mitigated by stack protection, discuss its limitations and what we will do next to approach them. Finally, we provide some quick…

When normal computer users fall into the nasty habit of recycling passwords, the result is most often some type of financial loss. When cybercriminals develop the same habit, it can eventually cost them their freedom. Our passwords can say a lot about us, and much of what they have to say is unflattering. In a world in which all databases — including hacker forums — are eventually compromised and leaked online, it can be tough for cybercriminals to maintain their anonymity if they’re in the habit of re-using the same unusual passwords across multiple accounts associated with different email addresses. The long-running Breadcrumbs series here tracks how cybercriminals get caught, and it’s mostly through odd connections between their online and offline selves scattered across the Internet. Interestingly, one of the…

Some of the world’s top tech firms are backing a new industry task force focused on disrupting cybercriminal ransomware gangs by limiting their ability to get paid, and targeting the individuals and finances of the organized thieves behind these crimes. In a 81-page report delivered to the Biden administration this week, top executives from Amazon, Cisco, FireEye, McAfee, Microsoft and dozens of other firms joined the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Europol and the U.K. National Crime Agency in calling for an international coalition to combat ransomware criminals, and for a global network of ransomware investigation hubs. The Ransomware Task Force urged the White House to make finding, frustrating and apprehending ransomware crooks a priority within the U.S. intelligence community, and to designate the current scourge of digital extortion as…

Big-three consumer credit bureau Experian just fixed a weakness with a partner website that let anyone look up the credit score of tens of millions of Americans just by supplying their name and mailing address, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Experian says it has plugged the data leak, but the researcher who reported the finding says he fears the same weakness may be present at countless other lending websites that work with the credit bureau. Bill Demirkapi, an independent security researcher who’s currently a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said he discovered the data exposure while shopping around for student loan vendors online. Demirkapi encountered one lender’s site that offered to check his loan eligibility by entering his name, address and date of birth. Peering at the code behind this…

In 2017, KrebsOnSecurity showed how easy it is for identity thieves to undo a consumer’s request to freeze their credit file at Experian, one of the big three consumer credit bureaus in the United States.  Last week, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a reader who had his freeze thawed without authorization through Experian’s website, and it reminded me of how truly broken authentication and security remains in the credit bureau space. Experian’s page for retrieving someone’s credit freeze PIN requires little more information than has already been leaked by big-three bureau Equifax and a myriad other breaches. Dune Thomas is a software engineer from Sacramento, Calif. who put a freeze on his credit files last year at Experian, Equifax and TransUnion after thieves tried to open multiple new payment accounts in his…

Posted by Krish Vitaldevara, Director of Product Management Trust & Safety, Google PlayProviding safe experiences to billions of users and millions of Android developers has been one of the highest priorities for Google Play for many years. Last year we introduced new policies, improved our systems, and further optimized our processes to better protect our users, assist good developers and strengthen our guard against bad apps and developers. Additionally, in 2020, Google Play Protect scanned over 100B installed apps each day for malware across billions of devices. Users come to Google Play to find helpful, reliable apps on everything from COVID-19 vaccine information to new forms of entertainment, grocery delivery, communication and more. As such, we introduced a series of policies and new developer support to continue to elevate information…

What was the best news you heard so far this month? Mine was learning that KrebsOnSecurity is listed as a restricted competitor by Gartner Inc. [NYSE:IT] — a $4 billion technology goliath whose analyst reports can move markets and shape the IT industry. Earlier this month, a reader pointed my attention to the following notice from Gartner to clients who are seeking to promote Gartner reports about technology products and services: What that notice says is that KrebsOnSecurity is somehow on Gartner’s “non exhaustive list of competitors,” i.e., online venues where technology companies are not allowed to promote Gartner reports about their products and services. The bulk of Gartner’s revenue comes from subscription-based IT market research. As the largest organization dedicated to the analysis of software, Gartner’s network of analysts…