cyber security news
Microsoft and Google have jointly disclosed a new side-channel CPU flaw, called Speculative Store Bypass. It is similar to the Spectre exploit that was reported in January 2018. This new exploit would require firmware update to the affected CPU’s. Intel has already released a beta firmware update.
Read more about it here.
Chili’s Grill & Bar, a popular restaurant chain, learned on May 11, 2018 that some guests’ payment card information was compromised at certain Chili’s restaurants. The data incident was limited to between March and April of 2018.
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Cybersecurity enthusiast Kushagra Pathak discovered a vulnerability in the Trello web management, allowing to mine credentials from doznes of public Trello boards with simple Google queries.
Trello is the project collaboration tool for enterprise and personal use. By default, Trello boards are set to either private or team-visible only. That doesn’t stop users from manually sharing personal boards that include confidential information, which may later by indexed by search engines. The credentials include usernames, passwords, API keys and more.
User should never store credentials on public boards.
Read more about it here.
Hackers once stole Las Vegas casino high-roller database via its fish tank, said Nicole Eagan, the CEO of cyber defense company Darktrace, on April 12, 2018, at the WSJ CEO Council Conference in London.
The hackers were able to breach the thermostat in the fish tank, which was used to control the temperature and quality of the water remotely. They then found the high-roller database, and then pulled that back across the network, out the thermostat, and up to the cloud. The name of the casino wasn’t revealed.
Hackers are increasingly targeting “internet of things” (IOT) devices to find their way into corporate networks.
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FIN7 hacking group stole credit card and debit card information from millions of consumers who have purchased at Saks Fifth Avenue, Saks Off 5th and Lord & Taylor stores. Parent company Hudson’s Bay Co. stated that the breach didn’t affect its online shopping sites or other brands.
Read more about it here.
On March 29, 2018, Under Armour announced that about 150 million accounts on its popular health app MyFitnessPal were hacked in February 2018. The affected data includes usernames, e-mail addresses, and hashed passwords. The company doesn’t collect Social Security numbers or driver’s license information, and credit card data is collected and stored separately. The company recommended that all users change their passwords.
For most users, the company uses the hash function “bcrypt” to convert all passwords into a hard-to-crack hash. However, some of the users had their password hashed using a less secure hash function called “SHA-1”.
The company recommended that all users change their passwords.
The root cause for the data breach wasn’t immediately disclosed.
Read more about it here.
15 year old security researcher Saleem Rashid discovered a flaw in cryptocurrency hardware wallets made by Ledger, a French company whose popular products are designed to physically safeguard public and private keys used to receive or spend the user’s cryptocurrencies.
The root cause is that the Ledger devices use a secure processor chip and a non-secure microcontroller chip. An attacker could compromise the insecure processor.
Ledger released a patch on March 6, 2018 to address vulnerability, and Eric Larchevêque, Ledger’s CEO, stated that the company hadn’t received any reports of hackers actually accessing the crypto keys.
Read more about it here.
On February 28, 2018, popular source code hosting web site GitHub was hit by the largest-ever distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, that peaked at 1.35 Tbps. The attack abused servers running Memcached, an open source distributed memory object caching system. The attack was an amplification attack, where the attacker sends a request of a few bytes to the target server, causing the server to respond with a much larger response, up to 51,200 times larger.
The Github website is protected by the anti-DDoS service provided Akamai.
Read more about it here.
A recently discovered PayPal issue allows anyone to reveal the last four digits of the payment method, the account balance and recent transactions. This vulnerability was reported to PayPal’s bug bounty program, where it was classified as being out of scope. The issue still exists as of February 25, 2018.
All the attacker needs to know is the e-mail address and phone number linked to the account. The attacker would then visit the Forgot Password page on PayPal’s web site, and enter the e-mail address of the target account. The web site would offer to confirm the credit card number linked to the account, while presenting the credit card type and the last 2 digits of the credit card number. The attacker would then call the customer service number, and try to guess via the interactive voice response system the last four digits of the credit card number. Having the last two digits already at hand, this leaves only 100 combinations to try.
Once the correct combination of the last four digits has been found, the attacker would use the interactive voice response system to retrieve the account balance and the recent transactions.
Read more about it here.
According to a report published in February 2018 by security giant McAfee, the global cost of cybercrime jumped from $500 billion in 2014 to $600 billion, representing about 0.8 of the global GDP.
The cost of cybercrime is distributed among all the countries of the world, no one country is spared.
The jump is mainly caused by increased number of online users from low income countries with weak cybersecurity, quick adoption of new technology and growing sophistication by cybercriminals, the growth of Cybercrime as a Service, and an expanding number of cybercrime centers in certain countries.
Read more about it here.