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Are Teens Giving The CIA A Headache?
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Teenage hackers are making merry with the online world of CIA director of national intelligence James Clapper.
This is the second bout of attacks from the group of technology tearaways, according to Motherboard, which reports on the Clapper problem and its connection to a group known as Crackas With Attitude.
A member of the group, a young chap called Cracka, told Motherboard that access to a range of Clapper accounts had been seized, and that Clapper and the CIA haven’t a clue what’s going on.
“I’m pretty sure they don’t even know they’ve been hacked. You asked why I did it. I just wanted the gov to know people aren’t fucking around, people know what they’re doing and people don’t agree #FreePalestine,” he said.
The claims were supported by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which confirmed that something has happened and that the authorities are looking into it.
“We’re aware of the matter and we reported it to the appropriate authorities,” said spokesman Brian Hale, before going mute.
Cracka, representing himself on Twitter as @dickreject, is less quiet. He has tweeted a number of confirmatory and celebratory messages that are not particularly flattering about the CIA and its abilities.
This is the group’s second bite at the CIA cherry. The teenagers walked into the personal email account of CIA director John Brennan last year and had a good look around. Some of the impact of this was washed away when it was discovered that Brennan used an AOL account for his communications.
“A hacker, who describes himself as an American high school student, has breached the CIA boss’s AOL email account and found a host of sensitive government files that one assumes a government official shouldn’t be sending to his personal email address,” said security comment kingpin Graham Cluley at the time.
“I’m not sure what’s more embarrassing. Being hacked or having an AOL email account.”
Courtesy-TheInq
Was WordPress Compromised Again?
The service set up by WordPress to better support WordPress has failed users by suffering a security breach and behaving just like the rest of the internet.
WordPress, and its themes, are often shone with the dark light of the security vulnerability, but we do not hear of WP Engine often. Regardless of that, it seems to do good business and is reaching out to those that it does business with to tell them what went wrong and what they need to do about it.
A reasonable amount of threat mitigation is required, and if you are affected by the issue you are going to have to change your password – again, and probably keep a cautious eye on the comings and goings of your email and financial accounts.
“At WP Engine we are committed to providing robust security. We are writing today to let you know that we learned of an exposure involving some of our customers’ credentials. Out of an abundance of caution, we are proactively taking security measures across our entire customer base,” says the firm in an urgent missive on its web pages.
“We have begun an investigation, however there is immediate action we are taking. Additionally, there is action that requires your immediate attention.”
That action, is probably to panic in the short term, and then to change your password and cancel out any instances of its re-use across the internet. You know the drill, this is a daily thing right. Judging by the WordPress statement we are in the early days of internal investigation.
“While we have no evidence that the information was used inappropriately, as a precaution, we are invalidating the following five passwords associated with your WP Engine account,” explains WordPress as it reveals the sale of its – actually, your, problem. “This means you will need to reset each of them.”
Have fun with that.
Courtesy-TheInq
Can Corporations Be Easily Hacked?
Hacking a major corporation is so easy that even an elderly grannie could do it, according to technology industry character John McAfee.
McAfee said that looking at the world’s worst hacks you can see a common pattern – they were not accomplished using the most sophisticated hacking tools.
Writing in IBTImes said that the worst attack was in 2012 attack on Saudi Aramco, one of the world’s largest oil companies. Within hours, nearly 35,000 distinct computer systems had their functionality crippled or destroyed, causing a massive disruption to the world’s oil supply chain. It was made possible by an employee that was fooled into clicking a bogus link sent in an email.
He said 90 per cent of hacking was social engineering, and it is the human elements in your organization that are going to determine how difficult, or how easy, it will be to hack you.
The user is the weakest link in the chain of computing trust, imperfect by nature. And all of the security software and hardware in the world will not keep a door shut if an authorized user can be convinced to open it, he said.
“Experienced hackers don’t concern themselves with firewalls, anti-spyware software, anti-virus software, encryption technology. Instead they want to know whether your management personnel are frequently shuffled; whether your employees are dissatisfied; whether nepotism is tolerated; whether your IT managers have stagnated in their training and self-improvement.”
Muct of this information can be picked up on the dark web and the interernet underground, he added.
“”Are you prepared for a world where grandma or anyone else can quickly obtain, on the wide open web, all of the necessary information for a social engineering hack? Is your organization prepared.
Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/can-corporations-be-easily-hacked.html
Was The Hilton Hotel Chain Hacked In April?
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The Hilton organization is reportedly trying to work out whether it has been hacked and, if so, what it should do about it.
We say reportedly as we have not been able to contact Hilton ourselves and can rely only on reports. They are pretty solid reports, however, and they concern a problem at the company that happened between 21 April and 27 July.
Brian Krebs, of KrebsOnSecurity, started this off with a report about a payment card breach. Krebs said that he had heard about the breach from various sources, and that Visa – the card provider – has mailed potentially affected parties with a warning, and the news that it is the fault of a bricks and mortar company.
Visa did not name the company, but affected parties, or banks to be more precise, have uttered it to Krebs. Its name is Hilton.
“Sources at five different banks say they have now determined that the common point-of-purchase for cards included in that alert had only one commonality: they were all were used at Hilton properties, including the company’s flagship Hilton locations as well as Embassy Suites, Doubletree, Hampton Inn and Suites, and the upscale Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts,” he wrote.
“It remains unclear how many Hilton properties may be affected by this apparent breach. Several sources in the financial industry told KrebsOnSecurity that the incident may date back to November 2014, and may still be ongoing.”
Krebs has a statement from the Hilton organisation in which the firm defended its security practices, and revealed that it is aware of the potential problem and is looking into it. This is a common theme among the breached, and should soon become part of mission statements.
“Hilton Worldwide is strongly committed to protecting our customers’ credit card information,” said the company in the statement to Krebs.
“We have many systems in place and work with some of the top experts in the field to address data security. Unfortunately the possibility of fraudulent credit card activity is all too common for every company in today’s marketplace. We take any potential issue very seriously, and we are looking into this matter.”
We have asked Visa and Hilton for their comments.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/was-the-hilton-hotel-chain-hacked-in-april.html
Hackers Accessed 10M Records At Excellus
September 23, 2015 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Hackers have penetrated the IT systems of U.S. health insurer Excellus BlueCross BlueShield and gained access to personal, financial and medical information of more than 10 million people, the company has disclosed.
The initial attack occurred in December 2013, but the company did not learn about it until Aug. 5. Since then it has been working with the FBI and cybersecurity firm Mandiant to investigate the breach.
The hackers may have had access to customer records which include names, addresses, telephone
numbers, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, member identification numbers, financial accounts and medical claims information.
Records may contain all or just some of that information, depending on the customer’s relationship with the company. The breach doesn’t affect just Excellus members, but also members of other Blue Cross Blue Shield plans who sought medical treatment in the upstate New York area serviced by the company.
The information was encrypted, but the attackers gained administrative privileges to the IT systems, allowing them to potentially access it, the company said on a website that was set up to provide information about the incident.
No evidence has been found yet that the data was copied or misused by the attackers.
Excellus will send breach notification letters via mail to all affected persons throughout the month and is offering free credit monitoring and identity protection services for two years through a partner.
The company will not contact affected individuals via email or telephone, so any emails or phone calls claiming to be from the company in regard to this attack should be ignored as they are probably scams.
The incident comes after three other Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurers — Anthem, Premera and CareFirst — announced large data breaches this year as a result of cyberattacks.
Excellus said that it doesn’t have sufficient information about the Anthem, Premera and CareFirst investigations in order to comment about possible connections between those attacks and the one against its own systems.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/hackers-accessed-10m-records-at-excellus.html
Did Stuxnet Infect A Russian Nuclear Plant?
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Kaspersky has claimed that the infamous Stuxnet computer worm “badly infected” the internal network of an unnamed Russian nuclear plant after it caused chaos in Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Speaking at a keynote presentation given at the Canberra Press Club 2013, Kaspersky CEO Eugene Kaspersky said a staffer at the unnamed nuclear plant informed him of the infection.
“[The staffer said] their nuclear plant network which was disconnected from the internet was badly infected by Stuxnet,” Kaspersky said.
“So unfortunately these people who were responsible for offensive technologies, they recognise cyber weapons as an opportunity.”
Stuxnet was discovered to have spread throughout industrial software and equipment in 2010 and is believed to have been created by the United States and Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. According to Kaspersky’s source, the malware was carried into the Russian nuclear plant and installed on a physically separated “air-gapped” network.
Kaspersky also made a rather outlandish joke during his speech, saying that all data is subject to theft. “All the data is stolen,” Kaspersky said. “At least twice.”
“If the claim of the Russian nuclear plant infection is true, then it’s easy to imagine how this “collateral damage” could have turned into a very serious incident indeed, with obvious diplomatic repercussions,” said security expert Graham Cluley.
“There is no way to independently verify the claim, of course. But it is a fact that Stuxnet managed to infect many computer systems outside of its intended target in Iran,” Cluley added. “Indeed, the very fact that it spread out of control, was what lead to its discovery by security firms.”
Earlier this year, Symantec claimed that the Stuxnet computer worm could date back further than 2010 and was more widespread than originally believed.
Symantec’s report called “The Missing Link” found a build of the Stuxnet attack tool, dubbed Stuxnet 0.5, which it said dated back to 2005 and used different techniques to sabotage industrial facilities.
Adobe Data Found Online
November 18, 2013 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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A computer security firm has discovered data it says belongs to some 152 million Adobe Systems Inc user accounts, suggesting that a breach reported a month ago is much larger than Adobe has so far disclosed and is one of the largest on record.
LastPass, a password security firm, said that it has found email addresses, encrypted passwords and password hints stored in clear text from Adobe user accounts on an underground website frequented by cyber criminals.
Adobe said last week that attackers had stolen data on more than 38 million customer accounts, on top of the theft of information on nearly 3 million accounts that it disclosed nearly a month earlier.
The maker of Photoshop and Acrobat software confirmed that LastPass had found records stolen from its data center, but downplayed the significance of the security firm’s findings.
While the new findings from LastPass indicate that the Adobe breach is far bigger than previously known, company spokeswoman Heather Edell said it was not accurate to say 152 million customer accounts had been compromised because the database attacked was a backup system about to be decommissioned.
She said the records include some 25 million records containing invalid email addresses, 18 million with invalid passwords. She added that “a large percentage” of the accounts were fictitious, having been set up for one-time use so that their creators could get free software or other perks.
She also said that the company is continuing to work with law enforcement and outside investigators to determine the cost and scope of the breach, which resulted in the theft of customer data as well as source code to several software titles.
The company has notified some 38 million active Adobe ID users and is now contacting holders of inactive accounts, she said.
Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the non-profit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, said information in an inactive database is often useful to criminals.
He said they might use it to engage in “phishing” scams or attempt to figure out passwords using the hints provided for some of the accounts in the database. In some cases, people whose data was exposed might not be aware of it because they have not accessed the out-of-date accounts, he said.
“Potentially it’s the website you’ve forgotten about that poses the greater risk,” he said. “What if somebody set up an account with Adobe ten years ago and forgot about it and they use the same password there that they use on other sites?”
Phishing Attacks Increasing
Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have reported significant growth in phishing attacks over the last year.
In a study entitled “The Evolution of Phishing Attacks”, Kaspersky said it found 37.3 million out of its 50 million customers running its security products that were at risk of being phished from 2012 to the present, an 87 percent increase over the same period between 2011 and 2012.
“The nature of phishing attacks is such that the simplest types can be launched without any major infrastructure investments or in-depth technological research,” Kaspersky said in the report.
“This situation has led to its own form of ‘commercialization’ of these types of attacks, and phishing is now being almost industrialized, both by cybercriminals with professional technological skills and IT dilettantes.”
The security firm explained that overall, the effectiveness of phishing, combined with its profitability for criminals and how simple the process is to undertake has led to a steadily rising number of these types of incidents.
Kaspersky noted that most of the victims in 2012-2013 were located in just ten countries, that is, Russia, the US, India, Germany, Vietnam, the UK, France, Italy, China and Ukraine. These 10 countries were home to 64 percent of all phishing attack victims during this time.
In addition to a rise in the number of users attacked, the number of servers involved in phishing attacks also increased, Kaspersky said, without giving any exact numbers. Though the firm did reveal that internet giants like Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Amazon are the top targets of malicious users.
“Online game services, online payment systems, and the websites of banks and other credit and financial organizations are also common targets,” the firm added, warning users to stay vigilant when entering personal data.
1 In 5 U.S. PCs Have No Antivirus Protection
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Nearly a fifth of Windows PCs in the U.S. lack any active security protection, an antivirus vendor stated on Wednesday, citing numbers from a year-long project.
“The scale of this is unprecedented,” argued Gary Davis, the director of global consumer product marketing for McAfee, talking about the scope of his company’s sampling of PC security.
McAfee took measurements from scans of more than 280 million PCs over the last 12 months, and found that 19.3% of all U.S. Windows computers browsed the Web sans security software. Owners of those systems downloaded and used McAfee’s free Security Scan Plus, a tool that checks for antivirus programs and enabled firewalls.
Globally, the average rate was 17%, putting the U.S. in the top 5 most-unprotected countries of the 24 represented in the scans.
Of the unprotected PCs in the U.S., 63% had no security software at all, while the remaining 37% had an AV program that was no longer active. The latter were likely trial versions of commercial antivirus software that had expired.
Antivirus trials are a fact of life in the Windows world. Most new machines come with security software that runs for a limited time. Some new Dell PCs, for example, come with a 30-day trial of McAfee’s Security Center program.
Microsoft Seizes Botnet Servers
Microsoft Corp scored a win in efforts to fight online banking fraud, saying it had seized several servers used to steal login names and passwords, disrupting some of the world’s most sophisticated cybercrime rings.
The software giant said on Monday that its cybercrime investigation group also took legal and technical actions to fight notorious criminals who infect computers with a prevalent malicious software known as Zeus.
By recruiting computers into networks called botnets, Zeus logs the online activity of infected machines, providing criminals with credentials to access financial accounts.
“We’ve disrupted a critical source of money-making for digital fraudsters and cyber thieves, while gaining important information to help identify those responsible and better protect victims,” said Richard Boscovich, senior attorney for the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, which handled the investigation in collaboration with the financial industry.
Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit is worldwide team of investigators, lawyers, analysts and other specialists who fight cybercrime. A year ago they helped U.S. authorities take down a botnet known as Rustock that had been one of the biggest producers of spam e-mail. Some security experts estimated that in its heyday Rustock was responsible for half the spam in junk email bins.