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Cyber News Rundown: Evite Data Breach

Reading Time: ~ 2 min.

Over 100 Million Accounts Exposed in Evite Breach

More than 100 million users of Evite were exposed after the company’s servers were compromised earlier this year. While the company doesn’t store financial information, plenty of other personally identifiable information was found in the leaked database dump. The initial figures for the breach were thought to be much lower, as another database dump of 10 million Evite users was found on an underground marketplace around the time they discovered the unauthorized access, though that site was shut down soon after.

American Express Suffers Phishing Attack

Many American Express customers recently fell victim to an email phishing attack that used the uncommon tactic of hiding the URL domain when hovering over the hyperlink. The attack itself, which requests the victim open a hyperlink to verify their personal information before re-routing them to a malicious site, was reliably full of spelling and grammar mistakes. The phishing landing page, though, looks nearly identical to the real American Express site and even has a drop-down list to catch multiple types of user accounts.

NHS Worries Over XP Machines

Over five years after Microsoft officially ceased support for Windows XP, the UK government has revealed that there are still over 2,000 XP machines still being used by its National Health Services (NHS). Even after becoming one of the largest targets of the 2017 WannaCry attacks, the NHS has been incredibly slow to roll out both patches and full operating sytem upgrades. While the number of effected systems, the NHS has over 1.4 million computers under their control and is working to get all upgraded to Windows 10.

Google Defends Monitoring of Voice Commands

Following a media leak of over 1,000 voice recordings, Google is being forced to defend their policy of having employees monitor all “OK Google” queries. After receiving the leaked recordings, a news organization in Belgium was able to positively identify several individuals, many of whom were having conversations that shouldn’t have been saved by the Google device in the first place. The company argues that they need language experts to review the queries and correct any accent or language nuances that may be missing from the automated response.

Monroe College Struck with Ransomware

All campuses of Monroe College were affected by a ransomware attack late last week that took down many of their computer systems. The attackers then demanded a ransom of $2 million, though it doesn’t appear that the college will cave to such exorbitant demands. Currently, the college’s systems are still down, but officials have been working to contact affected students and connect them with the proper assistance with finishing any coursework disrupted by the attack.

The post Cyber News Rundown: Evite Data Breach appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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Cyber News Rundown: GPS Vulnerabilities in Tesla Vehicles

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Multiple Tesla Models Vulnerable to GPS Attacks

Though it’s not the only manufacturer to offer GPS navigation in their vehicles, Tesla has once again suffered an attack on their GPS autopilot features. These attacks were able to trick the car into thinking it had arrived at an off-ramp more than two miles early, causing it to start to merge and eventually turn off the road entirely, even with a driver attempting to stop the action. Using off-the-shelf products, the test conductors were able to gain control of Tesla’s GPS in less than a minute.

Oregon DHS Successfully Phished

The personally identifiable information for at least 645,000 Oregon Department of Human Services (DHS) patients was illicitly accessed after a successful phishing attack on nine DHS employees. The attack allowed the hackers to obtain 2 million emails from the accounts, which contained everything from names and birthdates to social security numbers and confidential health information. Fortunately, the DHS issued a password reset shortly after the initial breach that stopped the attackers from getting any further and began contacting potential victims of the attack.

IP and Computer Blacklisting in New Ryuk Variant

The latest variant of the Ryuk ransomware includes an IP blacklist and a computer name check prior to beginning encryption. The IPs and computer name strings were likely implemented to stop any encryption of Russian computer systems. After these checks, the ransomware continues as normal using .RYK as the appended file extension and a ransom note that points victims to make payments to one of two proton mail accounts.

EatStreet Ordering Services Breached

A data breach is affecting the food ordering service EatStreet and possibly all of its 15,000 partnered restaurants. Payment card information for millions of customers using the app, along with some banking information for the 15,000 business partners, is believed to have been compromised in the breach. Though EatStreet quickly began improving their security and implementing multi-factor authentication following the breach, the damage was already done.

Fake System Cleaners on the Rise

While phony system cleaner apps have been common for many years, a recent study shows that user numbers for these apps has doubled from the same time last year to nearly 1.5 million. These apps often appear innocent and helpful at the outset, while others have begun taking an outright malicious approach. To make matters worse, these apps are commonly installed to fix the very issues they later create by slowing the computer down and causing annoying popups. 

The post Cyber News Rundown: GPS Vulnerabilities in Tesla Vehicles appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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Cyber News Rundown: Radiohead Hit by Ransomware Hack

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Radiohead Refuses Ransom, Releases Stolen Tracks

The band Radiohead recently fell victim to a hack in which 18 hours of previously unreleased sessions were ransomed for $150,000. Rather than pay the ludicrous fee, the band instead opted to release the tracks through Bandcamp for a donation to charity. The unreleased sessions were stored as archived mini discs the band created during the years surrounding their third album, “OK Computer.”

US Border Protection Breached by Contractor

A subcontractor for the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency is under scrutiny after it was revealed that they had illicitly transferred thousands of images of both license plates and travelers that had crossed the US/Mexico border in the last month. In doing so, the subcontractor broke several mandatory security policies written into a legal contract. While there is no sign of the images leaking onto the dark web, there is very little redress for the exposed travelers without proving actual harm.

Billions of Spam Emails Sent Everyday

The latest industry report on spam emails revealed that around 3.4 billion fake/spam emails are distributed across the globe each day. More worrisome is that the majority of these emails originate in the US and regularly target US-based industries. While many industries have improved security measures, larger enterprises have struggled to implement strong protection for their entire staff.

Ransomware Hits Washington Food Bank

The Auburn Food Bank in the State of Washington recently fell victim to a ransomware attack that encrypted all but one of their computers, which was isolated from the internal network. Instead of paying the ransom, the nonprofit chose to wipe all computers, including their email server, and begin rebuilding from scratch. The ransomware variant has been claimed to be GlobeImposter 2.0, which requires the victim to contact the attacker to determine the ransom demanded.

Retro Game Site Breached

The account information was leaked for over 1 million users of EmuParadise, a retro gaming site that hosts all things gaming related. The breach, which took place in April of 2018, affected 1.1 million IP and email addresses, many of which were found in previous data breaches. It is still unclear how the breach actually took place, though given the use of salted MD5 hashes for storing user data it’s clear EmuParadise could have done more to properly secure their users information.

The post Cyber News Rundown: Radiohead Hit by Ransomware Hack appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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Cyber News Rundown: Medical Testing Service Data Breach

Reading Time: ~ 2 min.

Quest Diagnostics Customers Affected by Third-Party Breach

The medical testing organization Quest Diagnostics has fallen victim to a third-party data breach that could affect nearly 12 million of their patients. AMCA, a collections agency that works with Quest Diagnostics, noticed unauthorized access to their systems over an eight-month period from August of last year through March 2019. The majority of data targeted were Social Security Numbers and other financial documents, rather than patient’s health records. The market offers a premium for such data.

Adware Installed by Millions of Android Users

Until recently, there were over 230 apps on the Google Play store that had been compromised by a malicious plugin that forced out-of-app advertisements on unsuspecting victims. Globally, over 440 million individuals have installed at least one of these compromised applications and have been affected by overly-aggressive advertisements. While this SDK has been used legitimately for nearly a year, sometime during 2018 the plugin began performing increasingly malicious behaviors, until other developers caught on and began updating their own applications to remove the plugin. 

Chinese Database Exposes Millions of Records

A database belonging to FMC Consulting, a headhunting firm based in China, was recently found by researchers to be publicly available. Among the records are resumes and personally identifiable information for millions of individuals, as well as company data with thousands of recorded messages and emails. Unfortunately for anyone whose information is contained within this database, in the two weeks since being notified of the breach FMC has yet acknowledge the breach or take steps to secure it.

Restaurant Payment Systems Infected

Customer who’ve patronized either Checkers or Rally’s restaurants in recent months are being urged to monitor their credit cards after the chain announced that they discovered card stealing malware on their internal systems. While not all restaurant locations were affected, the company is still working to determine the extent of the compromised payment card systems and has offered credit monitoring services to customers.

University of Chicago Medicine Server Found Online

Researchers have found a server belonging to University of Chicago Medicine with personal information belonging to more than 1.6 million current and past donors. The data includes names, addresses, and even marital and financial information for each donor. Fortunately, the researcher was quick to inform the university of the unsecured ElasticSearch server and it was taken down within 48 hours.

The post Cyber News Rundown: Medical Testing Service Data Breach appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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Cyber News Rundown: Popular News Site Breached

Reading Time: ~ 2 min.

News Site Suffers Data Breach

Flipboard, a news aggregation site, recently revealed that it’s been the victim of a data breach that could affect many of their more than 100 million active users. Digital tokens were among the compromised data, which could give the attackers further access to other sites, though Flipboard promptly removed or replaced them. At least two separate breaches have been reported by Flipboard, with one occurring in the middle of 2018 and the other in April of this year. Both allowed the attackers nearly unlimited access to databases containing a wealth of user data.

Keylogger Targets Multiple Industries

At least two separate campaigns have been found to be sending malicious emails to industry-leading companies in several different areas of business. Hidden within these emails are two variants of the HawkEye keylogger that perform various malicious activities beyond simply stealing keystrokes from the infected device. By acting as a loader, HawkEye can install additional malware and even contains a script to relaunch itself in case of a system reboot.

Australian Teen Hacks Apple

A teen from Australia was recently in court to plead guilty to two separate hacks on Apple, which he conducted in hopes of gaining a job with the company. While Apple has since confirmed that no internal or customer data was breached, they have chosen leniency after his lawyer made a case for the perpetrator being remorseful and not understanding the full impact of his crimes.

Fake Crypto-wallets Appear on App Store

Several fake cryptocurrency wallets have made their way into the Google Play store following the latest rise in the value of Bitcoin. Both wallets use some form of address scam, by which the user transfers currency into a seemingly new wallet address that was actually designed to siphon off any transferred currency. The second of the two wallets operated under the guise of being the “mobile” version of a well-known crypto-wallet. It was quickly identified as fake due to an inconsistent icon image. Both fake wallets were tied to the same domain and have since been removed from the store.

Ransomware Focuses on MySQL Servers

While the threat of GandCrab is not new, organizations discovered its persistent risk after researchers found it has been refocused on attacking MySQL servers. By specifically targeting the port used to connect to MySQL servers, port 3306, the attackers have had some success, since many admins allow port 3306 to bypass their internal firewalls to ensure connectivity. As GandCrab continues to narrow it’s attack scope, its remaining viable vectors are likely to be even more lucrative given that most organizations are not able to secure everything.

The post Cyber News Rundown: Popular News Site Breached appeared first on Webroot Blog.