Catégorie : Sécurité

On Tuesday, KrebsOnSecurity warned that hackers increasingly are using compromised government and police department email accounts to obtain sensitive customer data from mobile providers, ISPs and social media companies. Today, one of the U.S. Senate’s most tech-savvy lawmakers said he was troubled by the report and is now asking technology companies and federal agencies for information about the frequency of such schemes. At issue are forged “emergency data requests,” (EDRs) sent through hacked police or government agency email accounts. Tech companies usually require a search warrant or subpoena before providing customer or user data, but any police jurisdiction can use an EDR to request immediate access to data without a warrant, provided the law enforcement entity attests that the request is related to an urgent matter of life and death.…

There is a terrifying and highly effective “method” that criminal hackers are now using to harvest sensitive customer data from Internet service providers, phone companies and social media firms. It involves compromising email accounts and websites tied to police departments and government agencies, and then sending unauthorized demands for subscriber data while claiming the information being requested can’t wait for a court order because it relates to an urgent matter of life and death. In the United States, when federal, state or local law enforcement agencies wish to obtain information about who owns an account at a social media firm, or what Internet addresses a specific cell phone account has used in the past, they must submit an official court-ordered warrant or subpoena. Virtually all major technology companies serving large…

An Estonian man was sentenced today to more than five years in a U.S. prison for his role in at least 13 ransomware attacks that caused losses of approximately $53 million. Prosecutors say the accused also enjoyed a lengthy career of “cashing out” access to hacked bank accounts worldwide. Maksim Berezan, 37, is an Estonian national who was arrested nearly two years ago in Latvia. U.S. authorities alleged Berezan was a longtime member of DirectConnection, a closely-guarded Russian cybercriminal forum that existed until 2015. Berezan’s indictment (PDF) says he used his status at DirectConnection to secure cashout jobs from other vetted crooks on the exclusive crime forum. Berezan specialized in cashouts and “drops.” Cashouts refer to using stolen payment card data to make fraudulent purchases or to withdraw money from…

Microsoft and identity management platform Okta both this week disclosed breaches involving LAPSUS$, a relatively new cybercrime group that specializes in stealing data from big companies and threatening to publish the information unless a ransom demand is paid. Here’s a closer look at LAPSUS$, and some of the low-tech but high-impact methods the group uses to gain access to targeted organizations. First surfacing in December 2021 with an extortion demand on Brazil’s Ministry of Health, LAPSUS$ made headlines more recently for posting screenshots of internal tools tied to a number of major corporations, including NVIDIA, Samsung, and Vodafone. On Tuesday, LAPSUS$ announced via its Telegram channel it was releasing source code stolen from Microsoft. In a blog post published Mar. 22, Microsoft said it interrupted the LAPSUS$ group’s source code…

Pavel Vrublevsky, founder of the Russian payment technology firm ChronoPay and the antagonist in my 2014 book “Spam Nation,” was arrested in Moscow this month and charged with fraud. Russian authorities allege Vrublevsky operated several fraudulent SMS-based payment schemes, and facilitated money laundering for Hydra, the largest Russian darknet market. But according to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, it is equally likely Vrublevsky was arrested thanks to his propensity for carefully documenting the links between Russia’s state security services and the cybercriminal underground. An undated photo of Vrublevsky at his ChronoPay office in Moscow. ChronoPay specializes in providing access to the global credit card networks for “high risk” merchants — businesses involved in selling services online that tend to generate an unusually large number of chargebacks and reports of fraud, and…

Researchers are tracking a number of open-source “protestware” projects on GitHub that have recently altered their code to display “Stand with Ukraine” messages for users, or basic facts about the carnage in Ukraine. The group also is tracking several code packages that were recently modified to erase files on computers that appear to be coming from Russian or Belarusian Internet addresses. The upstart tracking effort is being crowdsourced via Telegram, but the output of the Russian research group is centralized in a Google Spreadsheet that is open to the public. Most of the GitHub code repositories tracked by this group include relatively harmless components that will either display a simple message in support of Ukraine, or show statistics about the war in Ukraine — such as casualty numbers — and…

Aleksei Burkov, seated second from right, attends a hearing in Jerusalem in 2015. Image: Andrei Shirokov / Tass via Getty Images. Aleksei Burkov, a cybercriminal who long operated two of Russia’s most exclusive underground hacking forums, was arrested in 2015 by Israeli authorities. The Russian government fought Burkov’s extradition to the U.S. for four years — even arresting and jailing an Israeli woman to force a prisoner swap. That effort failed: Burkov was sent to America, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to nine years in prison. But a little more than a year later, he was quietly released and deported back to Russia. Now some Republican lawmakers are asking why a Russian hacker once described as “an asset of supreme importance” was allowed to shorten his stay. A native of…

As their cities suffered more intense bombardment by Russian military forces this week, Ukrainian Internet users came under renewed cyberattacks, with one Internet company providing service there saying they blocked ten times the normal number of phishing and malware attacks targeting Ukrainians. John Todd is general manager of Quad9, a free “anycast” DNS platform. DNS stands for Domain Name System, which is like a globally distributed phone book for the Internet that maps human-friendly website names (example.com) to numeric Internet addresses (8.8.4.4.) that are easier for computers to manage. Your computer or mobile device generates DNS lookups each time you send or receive an email, or browse to a webpage. With anycast, one Internet address can apply to many servers, meaning that any one of a number of DNS servers…

Posted by Adrian Taylor, Chrome Security Team If you are a regular reader of our Chrome release blog, you may have noticed that phrases like 'exploit for CVE-1234-567 exists in the wild' have been appearing more often recently. In this post we'll explore why there seems to be such an increase in exploits, and clarify some misconceptions in the process. We'll then share how Chrome is continuing to make it harder for attackers to achieve their goals. How things work today While the increase may initially seem concerning, it’s important to understand the reason behind this trend. If it's because there are many more exploits in the wild, it could point to a worrying trend. On the other hand, if we’re simply gaining more visibility into exploitation by attackers, it's…

Microsoft on Tuesday released software updates to plug at least 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related software. For the second month running, there are no scary zero-day threats looming for Windows users, and relatively few “critical” fixes. And yet we know from experience that attackers are already trying to work out how to turn these patches into a roadmap for exploiting the flaws they fix. Here’s a look at the security weaknesses Microsoft says are most likely to be targeted first. Greg Wiseman, product manager at Rapid7, notes that three vulnerabilities fixed this month have been previously disclosed, potentially giving attackers a head start in working out how to exploit them. Those include remote code execution bugs CVE-2022-24512, affecting .NET and Visual Studio, and CVE-2022-21990, affecting…