Month: July 2020

Popular video conferencing platform Zoom disclosed this week that it fixed a bug, which allowed attackers to crack private meeting numeric passcodes.

By default, Zoom meetings are protected by a six-digit numeric password. However, according to Tom Anthony, VP Product at SearchPilot who identified the issue, the lack of rate limiting password attempts enabled “an attacker to attempt all 1 million passwords in a matter of minutes and gain access to other people’s private (password protected) Zoom meetings.”

Upon reporting the issue to Zoom on April 1, 2020, the tech company took the web client offline and fix the problem by April 9. Zoom mitigated the issue by both requiring a user logs in to join meetings in the web client, and updating default meeting passwords to be non-numeric and longer.

Read more about it here.

On July 15, 2020, some of the world’s richest and most influential politicians, celebrities, tech moguls and companies were the subject of a massive Twitter hack. The Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Barak Obama, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Kim Kardashian West and Bill Gates, as well as the corporate accounts of Apple and Uber, were hacked. The tweets were asking followers to send money to a Bitcoin address, which the celebrity would have matched with their own money. There have been at least 363 transactions since the tweets were posted, and that Bitcoin address accumulated over $118,000.

Shortly after the incident, many verified users reported they could no longer tweet, including media companies. Twitter acknowledged the issue.

It is still unknown how these accounts have been hacked.

This is the first time Twitter accounts have been hacked. In July 2018, cybercriminals impersonated the Twitter account of Elon Musk. In August 2020, Cybercriminals hacked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s account. And on Jan. 1, 2020, Mariah Carey’s Twitter account has been hacked.

Read more about it here.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), with contributions from the the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), issued an advisory on cyberattacks from the Tor network, and recommendations for mitigation.

Tor (a.k.a. The Onion Router) is a software that allows users to browse the web anonymously by encrypting and routing requests through multiple relay layers or nodes. Threat actors are leveraging Tor to conceal their identity and point of origin when engaging in “malicious cyber activity impacting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of an organization’s information systems and data.” Examples of this activity include performing reconnaissance, penetrating systems, exfiltrating and manipulating data, and taking services offline through denial-of-service attacks and delivery of ransomware payloads.

Organizations can implement mitigations of varying complexity and restrictiveness to reduce the risk of cyberattacks from the Tor network:

• Most restrictive approach: Block all web traffic to and from public Tor entry and exit nodes.
• Less restrictive approach: Tailor monitoring, analysis, and blocking of web traffic to and from public Tor entry and exit nodes.
• Blended approach: Block all Tor traffic to some resources, allow and monitor for others.

Read more about it here.