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GitHub on Monday noted that it had notified all victims of an attack campaign, which involved an unauthorized party downloading private repository contents by taking advantage of third-party OAuth user tokens maintained by Heroku and Travis CI. "Customers should also continue to monitor Heroku and Travis CI for updates on their own investigations into the affected OAuth applications," the company  said  in an updated post. The  incident  originally came to light on April 12 when GitHub uncovered signs that a malicious actor had leveraged the stolen OAuth user tokens issued to Heroku and Travis CI to download data from dozens of organizations, including NPM. The Microsoft-owned platform also said that it will alert customers promptly should the ongoing investigation identify additional victims. Furthermore, it cautioned that the adversary may also be digging into the repositories for secrets that could be used in other attacks. Heroku, which has pulled support for GitHub

Cloud-based repository hosting service GitHub on Friday revealed that it discovered evidence of an unnamed adversary capitalizing on stolen OAuth user tokens to unauthorizedly download private data from several organizations. "An attacker abused stolen OAuth user tokens issued to two third-party OAuth integrators, Heroku and Travis CI, to download data from dozens of organizations, including NPM," GitHub's Mike Hanley  disclosed  in a report. OAuth access tokens are often  used  by apps and services to authorize access to specific parts of a user's data and communicate with each other without having to share the actual credentials. It's one of the most common methods used to pass authorization from a single sign-on ( SSO ) service to another application. As of April 15, 2022, the list of affected OAuth applications is as follows - Heroku Dashboard (ID: 145909) Heroku Dashboard (ID: 628778) Heroku Dashboard – Preview (ID: 313468) Heroku Dashboard – Classi

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

Block, the company formerly known as Square, has disclosed a data breach that involved a former employee downloading unspecified reports pertaining to its Cash App Investing that contained information about its U.S. customers. "While this employee had regular access to these reports as part of their past job responsibilities, in this instance these reports were accessed without permission after their employment ended," the firm  revealed  in a April 4 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Block  advertises  Cash App as "the easiest way to send money, spend money, save money, and buy cryptocurrency." The breach is said to have occurred last year on December 10, 2021, with the downloaded reports including customers' full names as well as their brokerage account numbers, and in some cases, brokerage portfolio value, brokerage portfolio holdings, and stock trading activity for one trading day. The San Francisco-based company emphasized

An independent security researcher has shared what's a detailed timeline of events that transpired as the notorious LAPSUS$ extortion gang broke into a third-party provider linked to the cyber incident at Okta in late January 2022. In a set of screenshots posted on Twitter, Bill Demirkapi  published  a two-page "intrusion timeline" allegedly prepared by Mandiant, the cybersecurity firm hired by Sitel to investigate the security breach. Sitel, through its acquisition of Sykes Enterprises in September 2021, is the third-party service provider that provides customer support on behalf of Okta. The authentication services provider revealed last week that on January 20, it was alerted to a new factor that was added to a Sitel customer support engineer's Okta account, an attempt that it said was successful and blocked. The incident only came to light two months later after LAPSUS$  posted screenshots  on their Telegram channel as evidence of the breach on March 22. The

Authentication services provider Okta on Wednesday named Sitel as the third-party linked to a  security incident  experienced by the company in late January that allowed the LAPSUS$ extortion gang to remotely take over an internal account belonging to a customer support engineer. The company added that 366 corporate customers, or about 2.5% of its customer base, may have been impacted by the "highly constrained" compromise. "On January 20, 2022, the Okta Security team was alerted that a new factor was added to a Sitel customer support engineer' Okta account [from a new location]," Okta's Chief Security Officer, David Bradbury,  said  in a statement. "This factor was a password." The disclosure comes after LAPSUS$ posted screenshots of Okta's apps and systems earlier this week, about two months after the hackers gain access to the company's internal network over a five-day period between January 16 and 21, 2022 using remote desktop proto

Microsoft on Tuesday  confirmed  that the LAPSUS$ extortion-focused hacking crew had gained "limited access" to its systems, as authentication services provider Okta revealed that nearly 2.5% of its customers have been potentially impacted in the wake of the breach. "No customer code or data was involved in the observed activities," Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) said, adding that the breach was facilitated by means of a single compromised account that has since been remediated to prevent further malicious activity. The Windows maker, which was already tracking the group under the moniker DEV-0537 prior to the public disclosure,  said  it "does not rely on the secrecy of code as a security measure and viewing source code does not lead to elevation of risk." "This public disclosure escalated our action allowing our team to intervene and interrupt the actor mid-operation, limiting broader impact," the company's security

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said it has detained a "hacker" who offered technical assistance to the invading Russian troops by providing mobile communication services inside the Ukrainian territory. The anonymous suspect is said to have broadcasted text messages to Ukrainian officials, including security officers and civil servants, proposing that they surrender and take the side of Russia. The individual has also been accused of routing phone calls from Russia to the mobile phones of Russian troops in Ukraine. "Up to a thousand calls were made through this hacker in one day. Many of them are from the top leadership of the enemy army," the SBU  alleged , adding it confiscated the equipment that was used to pull off the operation. Besides implicating the hacker for helping Russia make anonymous phone calls to its military forces based in Ukraine, the agency said the hacker passed commands and instructions to different groups of "Russian invaders.&

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) on Tuesday slapped Facebook and WhatsApp owner Meta Platforms a fine of €17 million (~$18.6 million) for a series of security lapses that occurred in violation of the European Union's  GDPR laws  in the region. "The DPC found that Meta Platforms failed to have in place appropriate technical and organizational measures which would enable it to readily demonstrate the security measures that it implemented in practice to protect EU users' data, in the context of the twelve personal data breaches," the watchdog  said  in a press release. The decision follows the regulator's investigation into 12  data   breach   notifications  it received over the course of a six-month period between June 7 and December 4, 2018. "This fine is about record keeping practices from 2018 that we have since updated, not a failure to protect people's information," Meta  said  in a statement shared with the Associated Press. "

French video game company Ubisoft on Friday confirmed it was a victim of a "cyber security incident," causing temporary disruptions to its games, systems, and services. The Montreuil-headquartered firm said that an investigation into the breach was underway and that it has initiated a company-wide password reset as a precautionary measure. "Also, we can confirm that all our games and services are functioning normally and that at this time there is no evidence any player personal information was accessed or exposed as a by-product of this incident," the company  said  in a statement. The news of the hack comes amid a string of high-profile attacks targeting  NVIDIA ,  Samsung ,  Mercado Libre , and  Vodafone  in recent weeks. While the extortionist gang LAPSUS$ claimed responsibility for these attacks, it's not immediately clear if the group is behind the Ubisoft breach as well. Technology news site The Verge, which first  reported  the development, said th

French data protection regulators on Thursday found the use of Google Analytics a breach of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws in the country, almost a month after a  similar decision  was reached in Austria. To that end, the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL) ruled that the transatlantic movement of Google Analytics data to the U.S. is not "sufficiently regulated" citing a violation of  Articles 44 et seq.  of the data protection decree, which govern the transfers of personal data to third countries or international entities. Specifically the independent administrative regulatory body highlighted the lack of equivalent privacy protections and the risk that "American intelligence services would access personal data transferred to the United States if the transfers were not properly regulated." "[A]lthough Google has adopted additional measures to regulate data transfers in the context of the Google An

The wide-ranging adoption of cloud facilities and the subsequent mushrooming of organizations' networks, combined with the recent migration to remote work, had the direct consequence of a massive expansion of organizations' attack surface and led to a growing number of blind spots in connected architectures. The unforeseen  results of this expanded and attack surface  with fragmented monitoring has been a marked increase in the number of successful cyber-attacks, most notoriously, ransomware, but covering a range of other types of attacks as well. The main issues are unmonitored blind spots used by cyber-attackers to breach organizations' infrastructure and escalate their attack or move laterally, seeking valuable information.  The problem lies in discovery. Most organizations have evolved faster than their ability to keep track of all the moving parts involved and to catch up to catalog all past and present assets is often viewed as a complex and resource-heavy task wit

We hear about the need for better visibility in the cybersecurity space – detecting threats earlier and more accurately. We often hear about the dwell time and the time to identify and contain a data breach. Many of us are familiar with IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report that has been tracking this statistic for years. In the 2021 report, IBM found that, on average, it takes an average of 212 days to identify a breach and then another 75 days to contain the breach, for a total of 287 days. A new  solution overview document  provides insights on how XDR provider Cynet tackles the difficult problem of greatly improving threat visibility. Cynet takes a modern approach that includes a greater level of native technology integration and advanced automation purposely designed for organizations with smaller security teams than Fortune 500 organizations. A live webinar will discuss the same topic ( Register here ) Cynet's Keys for Threat Visibility Einstein said that the definition of i

Gone are the days when ransomware operators were happy with encrypting files on-site and more or less discretely charged their victims money for a decryption key. What we commonly find now is encryption with the additional threat of leaking stolen data, generally called Double-Extortion (or, as we like to call it: Cyber Extortion or Cy-X). This is a unique form of cybercrime in that we can observe and analyze some of the criminal action via 'victim shaming' leak sites. Since January 2020, we have applied ourselves to identifying as many of these sites as possible to record and document the victims who feature on them. Adding our own research, analyzing, and enriching data scraped from the various Cy-X operators and market sites, we can provide direct insights into the victimology from this specific perspective. We must be clear that what we are analyzing is a limited perspective on the crime. Nevertheless, the data gleaned from an analysis of the leak-threats proves to be ex