Catégorie : Sécurité

Millions of Americans receiving food assistance benefits just earned a new right that they can’t yet enforce: The right to be reimbursed if funds on their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards are stolen by card skimming devices secretly installed at cash machines and grocery store checkout lanes. On December 29, 2022, President Biden signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, which — for the first time ever — includes provisions for the replacement of stolen EBT benefits. This is a big deal because in 2022, organized crime groups began massively targeting EBT accounts — often emptying affected accounts at ATMs immediately after the states disperse funds each month. EBT cards can be used along with a personal identification number (PIN) to pay for goods at participating stores, and…

Microsoft is sending the world a whole bunch of love today, in the form of patches to plug dozens of security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software. This year’s special Valentine’s Day Patch Tuesday includes fixes for a whopping three different “zero-day” vulnerabilities that are already being used in active attacks. Microsoft’s security advisories are somewhat sparse with details about the zero-day bugs. Redmond flags CVE-2023-23376 as an “Important” elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows Common Log File System Driver, which is present in Windows 10 and 11 systems, as well as many server versions of Windows. “Sadly, there’s just a little solid information about this privilege escalation,” said Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative. “Microsoft does note that the…

Posted by Kent Walker, President, Global Affairs & Chief Legal Officer, Google & Alphabet and Royal Hansen, Vice President of Engineering for Privacy, Safety, and Security Should companies be responsible for cyberattacks? The U.S. government thinks so – and frankly, we agree. Jen Easterly and Eric Goldstein of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security planted a flag in the sand: “The incentives for developing and selling technology have eclipsed customer safety in importance. […] Americans…have unwittingly come to accept that it is normal for new software and devices to be indefensible by design. They accept products that are released to market with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of defects. They accept that the cybersecurity burden falls disproportionately on consumers and small organizations, which are…

Authorities in the United States and United Kingdom today levied financial sanctions against seven men accused of operating “Trickbot,” a cybercrime-as-a-service platform based in Russia that has enabled countless ransomware attacks and bank account takeovers since its debut in 2016. The U.S. Department of the Treasury says the Trickbot group is associated with Russian intelligence services, and that this alliance led to the targeting of many U.S. companies and government entities. Initially a stealthy trojan horse program delivered via email and used to steal passwords, Trickbot evolved into “a highly modular malware suite that provides the Trickbot Group with the ability to conduct a variety of illegal cyber activities, including ransomware attacks,” the Treasury Department said. A spam email from 2020 containing a Trickbot-infected attachment. Image: Microsoft. “During the height…

KrebsOnSecurity will likely have a decent amount of screen time in an upcoming Hulu documentary series about the 2015 megabreach at marital infidelity site Ashley Madison. While I can’t predict what the producers will do with the video interviews we shot, it’s fair to say the series will explore compelling new clues as to who may have been responsible for the attack. The new docuseries produced by ABC News Studios and Wall to Wall Media is tentatively titled, “The Ashley Madison Affair,” and is slated for release on Hulu in late Spring 2023. Wall to Wall Media is part of the Warner Bros. International Television Production group. “Featuring exclusive footage and untold firsthand interviews from those involved, the series will explore infidelity, morality, cyber-shaming and blackmail and tell the story…

Julius “Zeekill” Kivimäki, a 25-year-old Finnish man charged with extorting a local online psychotherapy practice and leaking therapy notes for more than 22,000 patients online, was arrested this week in France. A notorious hacker convicted of perpetrating tens of thousands of cybercrimes, Kivimäki had been in hiding since October 2022, when he failed to show up in court and Finland issued an international warrant for his arrest. In late October 2022, Kivimäki was charged (and “arrested in absentia,” according to the Finns) with attempting to extort money from the Vastaamo Psychotherapy Center. In that breach, which occurred in October 2020, a hacker using the handle “Ransom Man” threatened to publish patient psychotherapy notes if Vastaamo did not pay a six-figure ransom demand. Vastaamo refused, so Ransom Man shifted to extorting individual…

Posted by Oliver Chang, OSS-Fuzz team Since launching in 2016, Google's free OSS-Fuzz code testing service has helped get over 8800 vulnerabilities and 28,000 bugs fixed across 850 projects. Today, we’re happy to announce an expansion of our OSS-Fuzz Rewards Program, plus new features in OSS-Fuzz and our involvement in supporting academic fuzzing research. Refreshed OSS-Fuzz rewards The OSS-Fuzz project's purpose is to support the open source community in adopting fuzz testing, or fuzzing — an automated code testing technique for uncovering bugs in software. In addition to the OSS-Fuzz service, which provides a free platform for continuous fuzzing to critical open source projects, we established an OSS-Fuzz Reward Program in 2017 as part of our wider Patch Rewards Program. We’ve operated this successfully for the past 5 years, and…

On Dec. 23, 2022, KrebsOnSecurity alerted big-three consumer credit reporting bureau Experian that identity thieves had worked out how to bypass its security and access any consumer’s full credit report — armed with nothing more than a person’s name, address, date of birth, and Social Security number. Experian fixed the glitch, but remained silent about the incident for a month. This week, however, Experian acknowledged that the security failure persisted for nearly seven weeks, between Nov. 9, 2022 and Dec. 26, 2022. The tip about the Experian weakness came from Jenya Kushnir, a security researcher living in Ukraine who said he discovered the method being used by identity thieves after spending time on Telegram chat channels dedicated to cybercrime. Normally, Experian’s website will ask a series of multiple-choice questions about one’s…

Denis Emelyantsev, a 36-year-old Russian man accused of running a massive botnet called RSOCKS that stitched malware into millions of devices worldwide, pleaded guilty to two counts of computer crime violations in a California courtroom this week. The plea comes just months after Emelyantsev was extradited from Bulgaria, where he told investigators, “America is looking for me because I have enormous information and they need it.” A copy of the passport for Denis Emelyantsev, a.k.a. Denis Kloster, as posted to his Vkontakte page in 2019. First advertised in the cybercrime underground in 2014, RSOCKS was the web-based storefront for hacked computers that were sold as “proxies” to cybercriminals looking for ways to route their Web traffic through someone else’s device. Customers could pay to rent access to a pool of…

T-Mobile today disclosed a data breach affecting tens of millions of customer accounts, its second major data exposure in as many years. In a filing with federal regulators, T-Mobile said an investigation determined that someone abused its systems to harvest subscriber data tied to approximately 37 million current customer accounts. Image: customink.com In a filing today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, T-Mobile said a “bad actor” abused an application programming interface (API) to hoover up data on roughly 37 million current postpaid and prepaid customer accounts. The data stolen included customer name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number, as well as information on the number of customer lines and plan features. APIs are essentially instructions that allow applications to access data and interact…