The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: data breach

The Office of the Washington State Auditor (SAO) on Monday said it's investigating a security incident that resulted in the compromise of personal information of more than 1.6 million people who filed for unemployment claims in the state in 2020. The SAO blamed the breach on a software vulnerability in Accellion's File Transfer Appliance (FTA) service, which allows organizations to share sensitive documents with users outside their organization securely. "During the week of January 25, 2021, Accellion confirmed that an unauthorized person gained access to SAO files by exploiting a vulnerability in Accellion's file transfer service," the SAO  said  in a statement. The accessed information is said to have contained personal details of Washington state residents who filed unemployment insurance claims in 2020, as well as other data from local governments and state agencies. The exact information that may have been compromised include: Full name Social securi

21 people have been arrested across the UK as part of a nationwide cyber crackdown targeting customers of WeLeakInfo[.]com, a now-defunct online service that had been previously selling access to data hacked from other websites. The suspects used stolen personal credentials to commit further cyber and fraud offences, the UK National Crime Agency (NCA)  said . Of the 21 arrested — all men aged between 18 and 38 — nine have been detained on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offences, nine for Fraud offences, and three are under investigation for both. The NCA also seized over £41,000 in bitcoin from the arrested individuals. Earlier this  January , the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the NCA, the Netherlands National Police Corps, the German Bundeskriminalamt, and the Police Service of Northern Ireland jointly  seized the domain  of WeLeakInfo.com. Launched in 2017, the service provided its users a search engine to access the personal information illegally obtained from ov

The massive state-sponsored  espionage campaign  that compromised software maker SolarWinds also targeted Microsoft, as the unfolding investigation into the hacking spree reveals the incident may have been far more wider in scope, sophistication, and impact than previously thought. News of Microsoft's compromise was first reported by Reuters , which also said the company's own products were then used to strike other victims by leveraging its cloud offerings, citing people familiar with the matter. The Windows maker, however, denied the threat actor had infiltrated its production systems to stage further attacks against its customers. In a statement to The Hacker News via email, the company said — "Like other SolarWinds customers, we have been actively looking for indicators of this actor and can confirm that we detected malicious SolarWinds binaries in our environment, which we isolated and removed. We have not found evidence of access to production services or custom

State-sponsored actors allegedly working for Russia have  targeted  the US Treasury, the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), and other government agencies to  monitor internal email traffic  as part of a widespread cyberespionage campaign. The Washington Post, citing unnamed sources, said the latest attacks were the work of APT29 or Cozy Bear, the same hacking group that's believed to have orchestrated a breach of US-based cybersecurity firm  FireEye  a few days ago leading to the theft of its Red Team penetration testing tools. The motive and the full scope of what intelligence was compromised remains unclear, but signs are that adversaries tampered with a software update released by Texas-based IT infrastructure provider SolarWinds earlier this year to infiltrate the systems of government agencies as well as FireEye and mount a highly-sophisticated  supply chain attack . "The compromise of SolarWinds' Orion Ne

FireEye, one of the largest cybersecurity firms in the world, said on Tuesday it became a victim of a  state-sponsored attack  by a "highly sophisticated threat actor" that stole its arsenal of Red Team penetration testing tools it uses to test the defenses of its customers. The company said it's actively investigating the breach in coordination with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other key partners, including Microsoft. It did not identify a specific culprit who might be behind the breach or disclose when the hack exactly took place. However,  The New York Times  and  The Washington Post  reported that the FBI has turned over the investigation to its Russian specialists and that the attack is likely the work of  APT29  (or Cozy Bear) — state-sponsored hackers affiliated with Russia's SVR Foreign Intelligence Service — citing unnamed sources. As of writing, the hacking tools have not been exploited in the wild, nor do they contain zero-day expl

A hacking group known for its attacks in the Middle East, at least since 2017, has recently been found impersonating legitimate messaging apps such as Telegram and Threema to infect Android devices with a new, previously undocumented malware. "Compared to the versions documented in 2017, Android/SpyC23.A has extended spying functionality, including reading notifications from messaging apps, call recording and screen recording, and new stealth features, such as dismissing notifications from built-in Android security apps," cybersecurity firm ESET  said  in a Wednesday analysis. First detailed by Qihoo 360 in 2017 under the moniker  Two-tailed Scorpion (aka APT-C-23 or Desert Scorpion), the mobile malware has been deemed "surveillanceware" for its abilities to spy on the devices of targeted individuals, exfiltrating call logs, contacts, location, messages, photos, and other sensitive documents in the process. In 2018, Symantec discovered a  newer variant  of the

A Russian hacker who was found guilty of  hacking LinkedIn ,  Dropbox , and Formspring over eight years ago has finally been  sentenced  to 88 months in United States prison, that's more than seven years by a federal court in San Francisco this week. Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin , 32, of Moscow hacked into servers belonging to three American social media firms, including LinkedIn, Dropbox, and now-defunct social-networking firm Formspring, and stole data on over 200 million users. Between March and July 2012, Nikulin hacked into the computers of LinkedIn,  Dropbox, and Formspring , and installed malware on them, which allowed him to remotely download user databases of over  117 Million LinkedIn  users and more than  68 Million Dropbox  users. According to the prosecutor, Nikulin also worked with unnamed co-conspirators of a Russian-speaking cybercriminal forum to sell customer data he stole as a result of his hacks. Besides hacking into the three social media firms, Nikulin

The South African arm of one of the world's largest credit check companies Experian yesterday announced a data breach incident that exposed personal information of millions of its customers. While Experian itself didn't mention the number of affect customers, in a report , the South African Banking Risk Information Centre—an anti-fraud and banking non-profit organization who worked with Experian to investigate the breach—disclosed that the attacker had reportedly stolen data of 24 million South Africans and 793,749 business entities. Notably, according to the company, the suspected attacker behind this breach had already been identified, and the stolen data of its customers had successfully been deleted from his/her computing devices. "We have identified the suspect and confirm that Experian South Africa was successful in obtaining and executing an Anton Piller order which resulted in the individual's hardware being impounded and the misappropriated data being

Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed several security issues in popular online dating platform OkCupid that could potentially let attackers remotely spy on users' private information or perform malicious actions on behalf of the targeted accounts. According to a report shared with The Hacker News, researchers from Check Point found that the flaws in OkCupid's Android and web applications could allow the theft of users' authentication tokens, users IDs, and other sensitive information such as email addresses, preferences, sexual orientation, and other private data. After Check Point researchers responsibly shared their findings with OkCupid, the Match Group-owned company fixed the issues, stating, "not a single user was impacted by the potential vulnerability." The Chain of Flaws The flaws were identified as part of reverse engineering of OkCupid's Android app version 40.3.1, which was released on April 29 earlier this year. Since then, there

Researchers reported on Monday that hackers are now exploiting Google's Analytics service to stealthily pilfer credit card information from infected e-commerce sites. According to several independent reports from PerimeterX , Kaspersky , and Sansec , threat actors are now injecting data-stealing code on the compromised websites in combination with tracking code generated by Google Analytics for their own account, letting them exfiltrate payment information entered by users even in conditions where content security policies are enforced for maximum web security. "Attackers injected malicious code into sites, which collected all the data entered by users and then sent it via Analytics," Kaspersky said in a report published yesterday. "As a result, the attackers could access the stolen data in their Google Analytics account." The cybersecurity firm said it found about two dozen infected websites across Europe and North and South America that specialized in

A group of hacktivists and transparency advocates has published a massive 269 GB of data allegedly stolen from more than 200 police departments, fusion centers, and other law enforcement agencies across the United States. Dubbed BlueLeaks , the exposed data leaked by the DDoSecrets group contains hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents from the past ten years with official and personal information. DDoSecrets, or Distributed Denial of Secrets , is a transparency collective similar to WikiLeaks, which publicly publishes data and classified information submitted by leakers and hackers while claiming the organization itself never gets involved in the exfiltration of data. According to the hacktivist group, BlueLeaks dump includes "police and FBI reports, bulletins, guides and more," which "provides unique insights into law enforcement and a wide array of government activities, including thousands of documents mentioning COVID19. As you can see in the screens

The Indian Government said it has addressed a critical vulnerability in its secure document wallet service Digilocker that could have potentially let a remote attacker bypass mobile one-time passwords (OTP) and sign in as other users. Discovered separately by two independent bug bounty researchers, Mohesh Mohan and Ashish Gahlot , the vulnerability could have been exploited easily to unauthorisedly access sensitive documents uploaded by targeted users' on the Government-operated platform. "The OTP function lacks authorization which makes it possible to perform OTP validation with submitting any valid users details and then manipulation flow to sign in as a totally different user," Mohesh Mohan said in a disclosure shared with The Hacker News. With over 38 million registered users, Digilocker is a cloud-based repository that acts as a digital platform to facilitate online processing of documents and speedier delivery of various government-to-citizen services.

Joomla, one of the most popular Open-source content management systems (CMS), last week announced a new data breach impacting 2,700 users who have an account with its resources directory (JRD) website, i.e., resources.joomla.org. The breach exposed affected users' personal information, such as full names, business addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords. The company said the incident came to light during an internal website audit that revealed that a member of the Joomla Resources Directory (JRD) team stored a full unencrypted backup of the JRD website on an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket owned by the third-party company. The affected JRD portal lists developers and service providers specialized in Joomla, allowing registered users to extend their CMS with additional functionalities. Joomla said the investigation is still ongoing and that accesses to the website have been temporarily suspended. It has also reached out to the concerned third-pa

Brazil's biggest cosmetics company Natura accidentally left hundreds of gigabytes of its customers' personal and payment-related information publicly accessible online that could have been accessed by anyone without authentication. SafetyDetective researcher Anurag Sen last month discovered two unprotected Amazon-hosted servers—with 272GB and 1.3TB in size—belonging to Natura that consisted of more than 192 million records. According to the report Anurag shared with The Hacker News, the exposed data includes personally identifiable information on 250,000 Natura customers, their account login cookies, along with the archives containing logs from the servers and users. Worryingly, the leaked information also includes Moip payment account details with access tokens for nearly 40,000 wirecard.com.br users who integrated it with their Natura accounts. "Around 90% of users were Brazilian customers, although other nationalities were also present, including customers

British low-cost airline EasyJet today admitted that the company has fallen victim to a cyber-attack, which it labeled "highly sophisticated," exposing email addresses and travel details of around 9 million of its customers. In an official statement released today, EasyJet confirmed that of the 9 million affected users, a small subset of customers, i.e., 2,208 customers, have also had their credit card details stolen, though no passport details were accessed. The airline did not disclose precisely how the breach happened, when it happened, when the company discovered it, how the sophisticated attackers unauthorizedly managed to gain access to the private information of its customers, and for how long they had that access to the airline's systems. However, EasyJet assured its users that the company had closed off the unauthorized access following the discovery and that it found "no evidence that any personal information of any nature has been misused" b

DigitalOcean, one of the biggest modern web hosting platforms, recently hit with a concerning data leak incident that exposed some of its customers' data to unknown and unauthorized third parties. Though the hosting company has not yet publicly released a statement, it did has started warning affected customers of the scope of the breach via an email. According to the breach notification email that affected customers [ 1 , 2 ] received, the data leak happened due to negligence where DigitalOcean 'unintentionally' left an internal document accessible to the Internet without requiring any password. "This document contained your email address and/or account name (the name you gave your account at sign-up) as well as some data about your account that may have included Droplet count, bandwidth usage, some support or sales communications notes, and the amount you paid during 2018," the company said in the warning email as shown below. Upon discovery, a qui

A cybersecurity researcher today publicly disclosed technical details and PoC for 4 unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities affecting an enterprise security software offered by IBM after the company refused to acknowledge the responsibly submitted disclosure. The affected premium product in question is IBM Data Risk Manager (IDRM) that has been designed to analyze sensitive business information assets of an organization and determine associated risks. According to Pedro Ribeiro from Agile Information Security firm, IBM Data Risk Manager contains three critical severity vulnerabilities and a high impact bug, all listed below, which can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker reachable over the network, and when chained together could also lead to remote code execution as root. Authentication Bypass Command Injection Insecure Default Password Arbitrary File Download Ribeiro successfully tested the flaws against IBM Data Risk Manager version 2.0.1 to 2.0.3, which is not the la

International hotel chain Marriott today disclosed a data breach impacting nearly 5.2 million hotel guests, making it the second security incident to hit the company in recent years. "At the end of February 2020, we identified that an unexpected amount of guest information may have been accessed using the login credentials of two employees at a franchise property," Marriott said in a statement . "We believe this activity started in mid-January 2020. Upon discovery, we confirmed that the login credentials were disabled, immediately began an investigation, implemented heightened monitoring, and arranged resources to inform and assist guests." The incident exposed guests' personal information such as contact details (name, mailing address, email address, and phone number), loyalty account information (account number and points balance), and additional information such as company, gender, dates of births, room preferences, and language preferences. The ho

The Coronavirus is hitting hard on the world's economy, creating a high volume of uncertainty within organizations. Cybersecurity firm Cynet today revealed new data, showing that the Coronavirus now has a significant impact on information security and that the crisis is actively exploited by threat actors. In light of these insights, Cynet has also shared a few ways to best prepare for the Coronavirus derived threat landscape and provides a solution ( learn more here ) to protect employees that are working from home with their personal computers because of the Coronavirus. The researchers identify two main trends – attacks that aim to steal remote user credentials and weaponized email attacks: Remote User Credential Theft The direct impact of the Coronavirus is a comprehensive quarantine policy that compels multiple organizations to allow their workforce to work from home to maintain business continuity. This inevitably entails shifting a significant portion of the wor