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Code hosting service GitHub announced it is offering new tools and security features to secure code:
-Security vulnerability alerts with business partner WhiteSource data
-Dependency insights: A tool showing code dependencies, security vulnerabilities and open source licenses.
-Token scanning: Scanning of tokens from AWS, Azure, GitHub, Google Cloud and more.
Read more about it here.
A massive database containing the contact information of over 49 million Instagram influencers, celebrities and brand accounts has been found online. The news was first reported by the TechCrunch website. The database was left unprotected on an AWS (Amazon Web Services) bucket, allowing anyone to access it without authentication.
Each exposed record contained public data scraped from influencer Instagram accounts, including their bio, profile picture, the number of followers they have, whether they are verified, and their location by city and country, but also contained their personal contact information, such as the Instagram account owner’s email address and phone number.
TechCrunch traced the database back to Mumbai-based social media marketing firm Chtrbox, which pays influencers to post sponsored content on their accounts. In the meantime, Chtrbox pulled the database offline.
Read more about it here.
Japan will develop its first ever malware as a defense mechanism against cyber attacks
The Defense Ministry of Japan is considering malware that can break into an opponent’s computer system, hoping that such a computer virus will work as deterrence against cyberattacks.
The virus to be developed by private companies will be used only for defense purpose, not for pre-emptive attack, a ministry source said. The government allows cyberattacks only against a country or an organization equivalent to a country.
Read more about it here.
Researcher Sanyam Jain at GDI foundation discovered 8 unsecured databases, exposing approximately 60 million records of LinkedIn users.
Most of the data is publicly available on LinkedIn, so this isn’t a LinkedIn breach per se.
Records included LinkedIn public profile information, including IDs, profile URLs, work history, education history, location, listed skills, other social profiles, and the last time the profile was updated. Emails that were used for the initial account registration on LinkedIn, despite having privacy to be not available to the public, was also included.
The databases were appearing each day on a different IP address.
In total, 229 GB of data was leaked.
Read more about it here.
A ransomware attack knocked the Weather Channel off the air for at least 90 minutes on April 18, 2019. The broadcaster confirmed via Twitter that the incident was the result of “a malicious software attack on the network.” The Weather Channel was well prepared. IT staff were able to restore normal operations using backups.
Federal law enforcement are investigating the incident.
Read more about it here.
UpGuard, an Australian cybersecurity startup company, discovered two datasets stored on unprotected Amazon cloud servers.
“One, originating from the Mexico-based media company Cultura Colectiva, weighs in at 146 gigabytes and contains over 540 million records detailing comments, likes, reactions, account names, FB IDs and more… A separate backup from a Facebook-integrated app titled “At the Pool” was also found exposed to the public internet via an Amazon S3 bucket.” It contains information about users’ friends, likes, groups, and checked-in locations, as well as names, plaintext passwords for “At the Pool” accounts, and email addresses for 22,000 people.
Both datasets were stored in unsecured Amazon S3 buckets, that were secured on April 3, 2019 after Bloomberg notified Facebook, who worked with Amazon to secure them.
Read more about it here.
On March 29, 2019, Toyota Motor Company (TMC) announced in Japan that that its Tokyo Sales Holdings Inc., a TMC sales subsidiary, and its affiliated enterprises, as well as 3 other dealers in Japan, have been hacked. Unauthorized access had been detected on March 21, 2019 on a server containing data belonging to 3.1 million customers. Customer names and dates of birth were hacked, but no credit card information.
On February 21, 2019, Toyota Australia reported a security breach. Although no user or customer data was hacked at that time, the attack caused disruptions to its IT systems.
Read more about it here.
Security experts found an unprotected server operated by e-mail validation company Verifications.io, exposing 4 MongoDB databases. Initially, only one database was reported as being leaked. In total, 2,069,145,043 records (made up of both individual consumers and businesses) have been leaked.
Leaked information included first name, last name, e-mail, phone, city,state, date of birth, and more.
The good news is that the leaked data didn’t include financial data, medical records or other personal or confidential information.
The image below shows Verifications.io’s four MongoDB databases exposed to the internet.
The breached server and the web site have been down since.
Read more about it here.
American software giant Citrix was notified by the FBI on March 6, 2019 that it has been hacked.
The FBI believes attackers used the “password spraying” technique to access the Citrix network. In this technique, a large number of accounts (usernames) are attempted to be accessed by a low number of commonly used password, such as “Password1” or “Summer2018”.
Once inside, the attackers worked to obtain more privileges. According to one source, 6TB of e-mails, documents and corporate secrets were stolen.
So far, there aren’t any indications that personal information was stolen.
Read more about it here.
Here are some of the highlights from the 2019 Hacker Report:
Read more about it here.