data breach | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Europol, the European Union's premier law enforcement agency, has  announced  the arrest of a third Romanian national for his role as a ransomware affiliate suspected of hacking high-profile organizations and companies and stealing large volumes of sensitive data. The 41-year-old unnamed individual was apprehended Monday morning at his home in Craiova, Romania, by the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism ( DIICOT ) following a joint investigation in collaboration with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It's not currently known which ransomware gang the suspect was working with, but the development comes a little over a month after Romanian authorities  arrested two affiliates  of the REvil ransomware family, who are believed to have orchestrated no fewer than 5,000 ransomware attacks and extorted close to $600,000 from victims. Affiliates play a key role in the subscription-based ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) business models, a

It is a time when many are thinking of their families and loved ones, time off work, and gift-giving – the holidays. However, while many have their minds outside the realm of work during the holiday season, often, this is when attackers plan their most sinister attacks.  So how can you take precautions to protect your organization during these times? Why holidays put your company at risk of cyberattack Attackers today do not have a soft spot for businesses and give companies a break at any time of the year, especially not during holidays. On the contrary, any time of the year where companies may be less prepared to fend off a cyberattack is an opportunity for successful compromise. As a result, the holidays put your company at a higher risk of cyberattack.  Most end-users do not think about cybersecurity when surfing the web or receiving emails with holiday deals during the season. As a result, many let their guard down to a certain degree and become preoccupied and distracted m

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

Cryptocurrency trading platform BitMart has disclosed a "large-scale security breach" that it blamed on a stolen private key, resulting in the theft of more than $150 million in various cryptocurrencies. The breach is said to have impacted two of its hot wallets on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain and the Binance smart chain (BSC). The company  noted  that the wallets carried only a "small percentage" of the assets." Hot wallets, as opposed to their cold counterparts, are connected to the internet and allow cryptocurrency owners to receive and send tokens. Blockchain security and data analytics company PeckShield  estimated  the total loss to be around $200 million, calling the whole chain of events as "Pretty straightforward: transfer-out, swap, and wash." "This security breach was mainly caused by a stolen private key that had two of our hot wallets compromised," BitMart's chief executive Sheldon Xia  said  in a series of tweets sent

Japanese consumer electronics giant Panasonic has disclosed a security breach wherein an unauthorized third-party broke into its network and potentially accessed data from one of its file servers. "As the result of an internal investigation, it was determined that some data on a file server had been accessed during the intrusion," the company  said  in a short statement published on November 26. Panasonic didn't reveal the exact nature of the data that was accessed, but TechCrunch  reported  that the breach began on June 22 and ended on November 3. The Osaka-based company said that immediately upon discovering the intrusion on November 11, it took steps to report the incident to the relevant authorities and that it implemented security countermeasures, including preventing external access to the network. Panasonic also noted it's currently working with an independent "specialist" organization to probe the extent of the leak and determine if the access

In the business world, mergers and acquisitions are commonplace as businesses combine, acquire, and enter various partnerships. Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are filled with often very complicated and complex processes to merge business processes, management, and a whole slew of other aspects of combining two businesses into a single logical entity. In the modern business world before and after the acquisition, a new concern with M&A activities is cybersecurity. What role does cybersecurity play in today's mergers and acquisitions of businesses? Why is it becoming a tremendous concern? Cybersecurity threats are growing in leaps and bounds There is no question that cybersecurity risks and threats are growing exponentially. A  report from Cybersecurity Ventures  estimated a ransomware attack on businesses would happen every 11 seconds in 2021. Global ransomware costs in 2021 would exceed $20 billion. It seems there are constantly new reports of major ransomware attacks, cos

Web hosting giant GoDaddy on Monday disclosed a data breach that resulted in the unauthorized access of data belonging to a total of 1.2 million active and inactive customers, making it the  third   security incident  to come to light since 2018. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the world's largest domain registrar  said  that a malicious third-party managed to gain access to its  Managed WordPress  hosting environment on September 6 with the help of a compromised password, using it to obtain sensitive information pertaining to its customers. It's not immediately clear if the compromised password was secured with two-factor authentication. The Arizona-based company  claims  over 20 million customers, with more than 82 million domain names registered using its services. GoDaddy revealed it discovered the break-in on November 17. An investigation into the incident is ongoing and the company said it's "contacting all impacted custo

Today's businesses run on data. They collect it from customers at every interaction, and they use it to improve efficiency, increase their agility, and provide higher levels of service. But it's becoming painfully obvious that all of that data businesses collect has also made them an enticing target for cybercriminals. With each passing day, the evidence of that grows. In the last few months, we've witnessed massive data breaches that targeted  Neiman Marcus ,  Facebook , and the  Robinhood  stock trading app. And they're hardly alone. In recent years, the number of data breaches worldwide has averaged  close to three per day . That statistic suggests that the average business has a target on its back and is running out of time to mount a defense of its data. And doing so doesn't have to be difficult. To help, here's a simple 5-step framework businesses of all sizes can use to protect their customer data. Step One: Review and Adapt Data Collection Standards

Robinhood on Monday disclosed a security breach affecting approximately 7 million customers, roughly a  third of its user base , that resulted in unauthorized access of personal information by an unidentified threat actor. The commission-free stock trading and investing platform said the incident happened "late in the evening of November 3," adding it's in the process of notifying affected users. "Based on our investigation, the attack has been contained and we believe that no Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, or debit card numbers were exposed and that there has been no financial loss to any customers as a result of the incident," the Silicon Valley financial company  noted . The malicious third-party is believed to have socially engineered a customer service representative to gain access to internal support systems, using it to obtain the email addresses of five million users, full names for a different group of about two million people, and

Interactive livestreaming platform Twitch  acknowledged  a "breach" after an anonymous poster on the 4chan messaging board leaked its source code, an unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios, details of creator payouts , proprietary software development kits, and other internal tools. The Amazon-owned service said it's "working with urgency to understand the extent of this," adding the data was exposed "due to an error in a Twitch server configuration change that was subsequently accessed by a malicious third party." "At this time, we have no indication that login credentials have been exposed," Twitch  noted  in a post published late Wednesday. "Additionally, full credit card numbers are not stored by Twitch, so full credit card numbers were not exposed." The forum user claimed the hack is designed to "foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space" because "their communi

An unpatched design flaw in the implementation of Microsoft Exchange's Autodiscover protocol has resulted in the leak of approximately 100,000 login names and passwords for Windows domains worldwide. "This is a severe security issue, since if an attacker can control such domains or has the ability to 'sniff' traffic in the same network, they can capture domain credentials in plain text (HTTP basic authentication) that are being transferred over the wire," Guardicore's Amit Serper  said  in a technical report. "Moreover, if the attacker has DNS-poisoning capabilities on a large scale (such as a nation-state attacker), they could systematically syphon out leaky passwords through a large-scale DNS poisoning campaign based on these Autodiscover TLDs [top-level domains]." The Exchange  Autodiscover  service enables users to configure applications such as Microsoft Outlook with minimal user input, allowing just a combination of email addresses and pas

More than one terabyte of data containing 5.5 million files has been left exposed, leaking personal information of over 100,000 customers of a Colombian real estate firm, according to cybersecurity company WizCase. The breach was discovered by Ata Hakçıl and his team in a database owned by Coninsa Ramon H, a company that specializes in architecture, engineering, construction, and real estate services. "There was no need for a password or login credentials to see this information, and the data was not encrypted," the researchers  said  in an exclusive report shared with The Hacker News. The data exposure is the result of a misconfigured Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket, causing sensitive information such as clients' names, photos, and addresses to be disclosed. The details stored in the bucket range from invoices and income documents to quotes and account statements dating between 2014 and 2021. The complete list of information contained in

The maintainers of Jenkins—a popular open-source automation server software—have disclosed a security breach after unidentified threat actors gained access to one of their servers by exploiting a recently disclosed vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence service to install a cryptocurrency miner. The "successful attack," which is believed to have occurred last week, was mounted against its Confluence service that had been deprecated since October 2019, leading the team to take the server offline, rotate privileged credentials, and reset passwords for developer accounts. "At this time we have no reason to believe that any Jenkins releases, plugins, or source code have been affected," the company  said  in a statement published over the weekend. The disclosure comes as the U.S. Cyber Command  warned  of ongoing mass exploitation attempts in the wild targeting a now-patched critical security vulnerability affecting Atlassian Confluence deployments. Tracked as CVE-2

Cloud infrastructure security company Wiz on Thursday revealed details of a now-fixed Azure Cosmos database vulnerability that could have been potentially exploited to grant any Azure user full admin access to other customers' database instances without any authorization. The flaw, which grants read, write, and delete privileges, has been dubbed " ChaosDB ," with Wiz researchers noting that "the vulnerability has a trivial exploit that doesn't require any previous access to the target environment, and impacts thousands of organizations, including numerous Fortune 500 companies." Cosmos DB is Microsoft's proprietary  NoSQL database  that's advertised as "a fully managed service" that "takes database administration off your hands with automatic management, updates and patching." The Wiz Research Team reported the issue to Microsoft on August 12, after which the Windows maker took steps to mitigate the issue within 48 hours of r

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

Even as a massive data breach affecting Air India came to light the previous month, India's flag carrier airline appears to have suffered a separate cyber assault that lasted for a period of at least two months and 26 days, new research has revealed, which attributed the incident with moderate confidence to a Chinese nation-state threat actor called APT41. Group-IB dubbed the campaign "ColunmTK" based on the names of command-and-control (C2) server domains that were used for facilitating communications with the compromised systems.  "The potential ramifications of this incident for the entire airline industry and carriers that might yet discover traces of ColunmTK in their networks are significant," the Singapore-headquartered threat hunting company  said . While Group-IB alluded that this may have been a supply chain attack targeting SITA, the Swiss aviation information technology company told The Hacker News that they are two different security incidents.

Bolstering password policies in your organization is an important part of a robust cybersecurity strategy. Cybercriminals are using compromised accounts as one of their favorite tactics to infiltrate business-critical environments; as we've seen in recent news, these attacks can be dangerous and financially impactful. Unfortunately, account compromise is a very successful attack method and requires much less effort than other attack vectors. One of the essential types of password protection recommended by noted cybersecurity standards is  breached password detection . Hackers often use known breached password lists in credential stuffing or password spraying attacks. Here are some critical criteria to consider when your sysadmins are evaluating breached password protection solutions.  Breached password recommendations In the last few years, password security recommendations have evolved past the traditional recommendations regarding password security.  Businesses have used M