Catégorie : Sécurité

At the outset of their federal criminal trial for hijacking vast swaths of Internet addresses for use in large-scale email spam campaigns, three current or former executives at online advertising firm Adconion Direct (now Amobee) have pleaded guilty to lesser misdemeanor charges of fraud and misrepresentation via email. In October 2018, prosecutors in the Southern District of California named four Ad employees — Jacob Bychak, Mark Manoogian, Petr Pacas, and Mohammed Abdul Qayyum —  in a ten-count indictment (PDF) on felony charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and electronic mail fraud. The government alleged that between December 2010 and September 2014, the defendants engaged in a conspiracy to identify or pay to identify blocks of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that were registered to others but which were otherwise inactive. Prosecutors said the men also sent forged letters…

Netflix has a new documentary series airing next week — “Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies & the Internet” — in which Yours Truly apparently has a decent amount of screen time. The debut episode explores the far-too-common harassment tactic of “swatting” — wherein fake bomb threats or hostage situations are phoned in to police as part of a scheme to trick them into visiting potentially deadly force on a target’s address. Image: Netflix.com The producers of the Netflix show said footage from an interview I sat for in early 2020 on swatting and other threats should appear in the first episode. They didn’t specify what additional topics the series would scrutinize, but Netflix’s teaser for the show suggests it concerns cybercrimes that result in deadly, real-world kinetic attacks. “Conspiracy.…

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) recently revised its policy on charging violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a 1986 law that remains the primary statute by which federal prosecutors pursue cybercrime cases. The new guidelines state that prosecutors should avoid charging security researchers who operate in “good faith” when finding and reporting vulnerabilities. But legal experts continue to advise researchers to proceed with caution, noting the new guidelines can’t be used as a defense in court, nor are they any kind of shield against civil prosecution. In a statement about the changes, Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco said the DOJ “has never been interested in prosecuting good-faith computer security research as a crime,” and that the new guidelines “promote cybersecurity by providing clarity for good-faith…

Posted by Harshvardhan Sharma, Information Security Engineer, Google 2021 was another record-breaking year for our Vulnerability Rewards Program (VRP). We paid a total of $8.7 million in rewards, our highest amount yet. 2021 saw some amazing work from the security research community. It is worth noting that a significant portion of the reports we received were for findings in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) products. It is heartening to see an increasing number of talented researchers getting involved in cloud security. We first announced the GCP VRP Prize in 2019 to encourage security researchers to focus on the security of GCP, in turn helping us make GCP more secure for our users, customers, and the internet at large. Even 3 years into the program, the submissions we are getting never cease to…

Costa Rica’s national health service was hacked sometime earlier this morning by a Russian ransomware group known as Hive. The intrusion comes just weeks after Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves declared a state of emergency in response to a data ransom attack from a different Russian ransomware gang — Conti. Ransomware experts say there is good reason to believe the same cybercriminals are behind both attacks, and that Hive has been helping Conti rebrand and evade international sanctions targeting extortion payouts to cybercriminals operating in Russia. The Costa Rican publication CRprensa.com reports that affected systems at the Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS) were taken offline on the morning of May 31, but that the extent of the breach was still unclear. The CCSS is responsible for Costa Rica’s public…

Posted by Anton Bikineev, Michael Lippautz and Hannes Payer, Chrome security team Memory safety in Chrome is an ever-ongoing effort to protect our users. We are constantly experimenting with different technologies to stay ahead of malicious actors. In this spirit, this post is about our journey of using heap scanning technologies to improve memory safety of C++. Let’s start at the beginning though. Throughout the lifetime of an application its state is generally represented in memory. Temporal memory safety refers to the problem of guaranteeing that memory is always accessed with the most up to date information of its structure, its type. C++ unfortunately does not provide such guarantees. While there is appetite for different languages than C++ with stronger memory safety guarantees, large codebases such as Chromium will use…

Some of more tech-savvy Democrats in the U.S. Senate are asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate identity-proofing company ID.me for “deceptive statements” the company and its founder allegedly made over how they handle facial recognition data collected on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service, which until recently required anyone seeking a new IRS account online to provide a live video selfie to ID.me. In a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan, the Senators charge that ID.me’s CEO Blake Hall has offered conflicting statements about how his company uses the facial scan data it collects on behalf of the federal government and many states that use the ID proofing technology to screen applicants for unemployment insurance. The lawmakers say that in public statements and blog posts, ID.me has frequently emphasized…

Posted by GKE and Anthos Platform Security Teams  At the KubeCon EU 2022 conference in Valencia, security researchers from Palo Alto Networks presented research findings on “trampoline pods”—pods with an elevated set of privileges required to do their job, but that could conceivably be used as a jumping off point to gain escalated privileges. The research mentions GKE, including how developers should look at the privileged pod problem today, what the GKE team is doing to minimize the use of privileged pods, and actions GKE users can take to protect their clusters. Privileged pods within the context of GKE securityWhile privileged pods can pose a security issue, it’s important to look at them within the overall context of GKE security. To use a privileged pod as a “trampoline” in GKE,…

Millions of U.S. government employees and contractors have been issued a secure smart ID card that enables physical access to buildings and controlled spaces, and provides access to government computer networks and systems at the cardholder’s appropriate security level. But many government employees aren’t issued an approved card reader device that lets them use these cards at home or remotely, and so turn to low-cost readers they find online. What could go wrong? Here’s one example. A sample Common Access Card (CAC). Image: Cac.mil. KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader — we’ll call him “Mark” because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press — who works in IT for a major government defense contractor and was issued a Personal Identity Verification (PIV) government smart card designed for civilian employees.…

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) says it is investigating reports that hackers gained unauthorized access to an agency portal that taps into 16 different federal law enforcement databases. KrebsOnSecurity has learned the alleged compromise is tied to a cybercrime and online harassment community that routinely impersonates police and government officials to harvest personal information on their targets. Unidentified hackers shared this screenshot of alleged access to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s intelligence sharing portal. On May 8, KrebsOnSecurity received a tip that hackers obtained a username and password for an authorized user of esp.usdoj.gov, which is the Law Enforcement Inquiry and Alerts (LEIA) system managed by the DEA. KrebsOnSecurity shared information about the allegedly hijacked account with the DEA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Justice,…