ShinyHunters | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Conor Brian Fitzpatrick has been sentenced to time served and 20 years of supervised release for his role as the creator and administrator of BreachForums. Fitzpatrick, who went by the online alias "pompompurin," was arrested in March 2023 in New York and was subsequently charged with conspiracy to commit access device fraud and possession of child pornography. He was later released on a $300,000 bond, and in July 2023, he pleaded guilty to the charges. BreachForums was a major cyber crime marketplace that facilitated the trafficking of stolen data since March 2022. Prior to its shutdown exactly a year later, the website boasted of over 340,000 members. Among the stolen items commonly sold on the platform were bank account information, Social Security numbers, personally identifying information (PII), hacking tools, breached databases, and account login information for compromised online accounts with service providers and merchants. BreachForums also advertised servic

ShinyHunters, a notorious cybercriminal underground group that's been on a data breach spree since last year, has been observed searching companies' GitHub repository source code for vulnerabilities that can be abused to stage larger scale attacks, an analysis of the hackers' modus operandi has revealed. "Primarily operating on Raid Forums, the collective's moniker and motivation can partly be derived from their avatar on social media and other forums: a shiny Umbreon Pokémon," Intel 471 researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "As Pokémon players hunt and collect "shiny" characters in the game, ShinyHunters collects and resells user data." The revelation comes as the  average cost of a data breach  rose from $3.86 million to $4.24 million, making it the highest average cost in 17 years, with compromised credentials responsible for 20% of the breaches reported by over 500 organizations. Since rising to prominence in A

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or