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High Value Cryptocurrency Stolen by Hackers

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Hackers Breach Private Keys to Steal Cryptocurrency

A possible coding error allowed hackers to compromise at least 732 unique, improperly secured private keys used in the Ethereum blockchain. By exploiting a vulnerability, hackers have successfully stolen 38,000 Ethereum coins so far, translating to over $54 million in stolen funds, though the current number is likely much higher. While uncommon, such attacks do show that the industry’s security and key-generation standards have plenty of room for improvement.

Prominent Malware Reverse Engineer Faces Jail Time

The malware researcher Marcus Hutchins, who successfully reversed and stopped the WannaCry ransomware attacks in 2017, is facing up to six years of jail time for prior malware creation and distribution. Hutchins’ charges all tie back to his involvement in the creation of Kronos, a widespread banking Trojan that’s caused significant damage around the world.

Data Exposed for Thousands of Rehab Patients

Personally identifiable data belonging to nearly 145,000 patients of a Pennsylvania rehab facility have been found in a publicly available database. After a Shodan search, researchers discovered the database that contained roughly 4.9 million unique documents showing information ranging from names and birthdays to specific medical services provided and billing records, all of which could be used to to steal the identity of these thousands of individuals.

Study Finds Password Security Still Lacking

After this year’s review of password security it may come as no surprise that the top five passwords still in use are simple and have remained at the top for some time. Using a list generated from past data breaches, researchers found the password “123456” was used over 23 million times, with similar variations rounding out the top five. Several popular names, sports teams, and bands like blink182 and Metallica are still in use for hundreds of thousands of accounts. While these passwords may be easy to remember, they are exceedingly simple to guess. Stronger passwords should include multiple words or numbers to increase the complexity.

Bodybuilding Site Breached through Phishing Campaign

The website bodybuilding.com has announced they were the victim of a data breach stemming from an email phishing campaign in July 2018 that could affect many of the site’s clients. Fortunately, the site doesn’t store full payment card data, and the data it does store is only stored at the customer’s request, leaving little data for hackers to actually use. The site also forced a password reset for all users issued a warning about suspicious emails coming from bodybuilding.com, noting they may be part of another phishing campaign.

The post High Value Cryptocurrency Stolen by Hackers appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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Cyber News Rundown: Phishing Attack on Global IT Outsourcer

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Major IT Outsourcer Suffers After Phishing Attack

Global IT services provider Wipro announced they are in the process of investigating a data possibly affecting some of their clients. These types of companies are popular for hackers because, by breaching a single IT service company, they gain access to a far larger pool of victims through compromised credentials belonging to client networks. It’s still unclear how long the hackers had access to the systems, but some reports claim the attack was ongoing for several months.

Age-Verification Hits UK Porn Viewers

The UK has passed a measure that will subject users to age-verifications before being allowed to enter a pornographic website, as part of their ongoing fight to make the UK safer online. This measure was originally introduced as a way to decrease ransomware infections and slow the stream of stolen credentials from paid accounts for higher-traffic sites. The new law has an 88% backing from UK parents and will go into full effect on July 15.

Data Breach Affects Navicent Patients

A recent Navicent Health announcement revealed the email systems of the health care services provider were compromised in July, 2018, possibly affecting over 275,000 patients. While the remainder of their internal systems were untouched, the email server did contain patient data, including social security numbers and billing information. Fortunately, Navicent responded to the breach quickly and began notifying the proper authorities, as well as their client base, in addition to providing identity monitoring services for those whose information was exposed.

Chrome for iOS Bug Redirects Users to Ads

A new bug, found only in the iOS version of Chrome, has exposed up to half a million users to unwanted advertising redirects, sometimes from legitimate websites. The bug works by allowing malicious code to be executed from within page advertisements, which can then overlay onto the device’s screen until clicked. The majority of this campaign’s victims are based in the US and were targeted over a four-day period in early April.

Microsoft Loses Subdomain for Live Tiles

A German researcher recently took control of a subdomain used by Microsoft to assist websites with correctly formatting RSS feeds into a usable XML format for Windows 8 and 10 Live Tiles. Because the subdomain wasn’t registered to Microsoft or their Azure cloud services, and any malicious actor could have compromised the domain, the researcher purchased it and alerted Microsoft of his findings.

The post Cyber News Rundown: Phishing Attack on Global IT Outsourcer appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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Cyber News Rundown: Massive Data Breach at Georgia Tech

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Massive Data Breach at Georgia Tech

It was recently revealed that the personal information on over 1.3 million people was illicitly accessed by hackers who breached Georgia Tech systems in December of last year. The breach is the second of the year for the university, and was only discovered after IT staff noted performance issues on a widely used web application that interacts with a major database for both students and staff. 

Restaurant Firm Admits to Data Breach

Earl Enterprises, the parent firm of several popular restaurants around the country, recently announced they had fallen victim to a point-of-sale breach at multiple restaurant locations over the last 10 months. At least 100 restaurants, including all locations of the Italian chain Buca di Beppo, have begun working on restoring their systems and contacting affected customers. Nearly 2.1 million payment card accounts have been found in a dark web marketplace that were posted just a month before the company made its discovery.

Toyota Confirms Sales Data Breach

Personal information for over 3.1 million individuals may have been compromised before officials found signs of unauthorized activity on an internal network used in multiple sales subsidiaries of Toyota and Lexus. While the company’s dealerships continue to provide service and parts to customers, this specific breach comes only a month after another cyber attack that impacted Toyota dealerships in Australia, leaving many customers worried about the safety of their data.

GPS Watches Display PWNED! Message

Nearly a year after researchers contacted the watch maker Vidimensio about multiple vulnerabilities in their GPS watches, a new message has appeared on watch maps. The phrase “PWNED!” has been seen on at least 20 different watch models as a message alerting the company to their poor security infrastructure, as end-users are susceptible to being tracked through their watches. More alarmingly, many of the devices were found to have this vulnerability after Germany passed a law banning smart-watches for children that were capable of remote-listening after it was found they often ran on unpatched firmware.

Ransomware Strikes Albany, NY

The city of Albany, New York has been working to restore normal operations after a ransomware attack took down several key components of its systems. Aside from a few document-specific requests, however, the vast majority of the functionality was left undisturbed throughout the attack and recovery process. According to officials, all public safety services remained fully operational and had staff working around the clock to continue to provide assistance or direct individuals to a working facility.

The post Cyber News Rundown: Massive Data Breach at Georgia Tech appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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Cyber News Rundown: Hacker Exposes 26 Million Personal Records

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Gnosticplayers Adds 26 Million More Records for Sale

After the first 3 major data dumps, which totaled over 600 million records, the hacker known as Gnosticplayers has released his latest cache of data, which contains at least 26 million personal user records. These data caches hold customer information for 32 companies overall and have been obtained over just the past couple months, making the data that much more lucrative. The hacker claims these breaches are done simply out of frustration that security is still not being taken seriously by many major companies from across the globe, which may explain why the price tag for each dump is so low.

Hackers Set Off Tornado Sirens in Texas Towns

At least 30 tornado warning sirens in two Texas towns were triggered in the early morning hours by an unknown hacker. While officials quickly shut down the sirens, they did so just 24 hours prior to a major storm during which they might have needed to use these critical emergency systems. This attack is very similar to one that affected the entire Dallas area in 2017, when hackers successfully compromised a radio system that set off over 100 tornado sirens across the city.

Marketing Firm Exposes 230 Million Records

Another misconfigured Amazon database, this time belonging to Exactis, carries the blame for a data breach that could affect at least 230 million individuals, with more data on 110 million individual records tied to businesses. While it is still unclear exactly how long the database was accessible, the company and an external security auditor maintain that the data was not accessed maliciously during its time online, though the independent researcher who first discovered the database reports that the data may have been spotted for sale on the dark web.

Ransomware Cripples Major Aluminum Manufacturer

Norsk Hydro, a major Aluminum producer, suffered a ransomware attack that successfully shut down a large portion of the company’s operations. The attack forced the company to switch to manual operations at all of its facilities around the world, and temporarily take down their website while they worked to restore their systems from backups. Fortunately, the company retains backups for their major operations, so normal production should resume within the week.

Gearbest Leaks 1.5 Million Customer Records

Following the trend of unprotected databases, researchers recently found yet another one, this time belonging to Gearbest (a Chinese e-commerce site). This database contained unencrypted personal records for over 1.5 million customers around the globe, including payment data, ID and passport info, and even data that could compromise Gearbest itself, as URLs for an internal software platform were also exposed. The company has since claimed that the number of exposed records is much smaller than originally posted. However, they also maintain that they use strong encryption on all stored data, despite this latest evidence to the contrary. 

The post Cyber News Rundown: Hacker Exposes 26 Million Personal Records appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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Cyber News Rundown: Georgia County Pays for Ransomware Threat

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Georgia County Pays Six Figure Ransom to Restore IT Systems

Following a ransomware attack earlier this month, officials in Jackson County, Georgia decided to pay a $400,000 ransom in order to obtain a decryption key and return their systems to normal operations. While it’s not normally recommended to pay ransoms, but instead to keep proper backups of critical files, the county decided that it would cost significantly more to restore the systems on their own. It is still unclear how the breach unfolded or how long the hackers had access to the network.

Michigan Healthcare Group Compromised

Sensitive information on over 600,000 patients was recently exposed after the Wolverine Solutions Group (WSG) suffered a data breach. The WSG initially suffered a ransomware attack in September of last year, and has been working to decrypt many of their systems since then. Due to Michigan’s lax laws regarding the announcement of a data breach, customers who may have been affected were contacted only within the last month.

Redirect Tags Found on Fortune 100 Sites

Hundreds of third-party redirect tags have been found hidden on the websites of Fortune 100 companies. These tags could allow attackers to access user data from any of the compromised sites and also degrade the performance of sites with multiple hidden tags. Many site owners even expressed concern over possible customer data loss, but did little to clear the tags from  their sites.

Asian Gaming Companies Infiltrated by Backdoors

Several Asia-based gaming companies have discovered hidden backdoors within main executables of some games attracting tens of thousands of players. Fortunately, after identifying the malicious code two of the three companies immediately pushed updates to their software, and the command & control servers for the backdoors were taken offline soon after. The backdoors appear to have originated from a malicious Chinese hacker group that has committed these types of attacks multiple times in recent years.

Info on 1.8 Million Women Found on Unprotected Chinese Database

An unprotected database was recently found which contains extremely sensitive data for nearly 1.8 million women in China. Amongst the personally identifying information was GPS coordinates, political affiliations, and even available video of specific individuals. Unfortunately, while the owners of this one database were successfully contacted, there are still thousands of similarly unprotected databases on Chinese networks.

The post Cyber News Rundown: Georgia County Pays for Ransomware Threat appeared first on Webroot Blog.