database security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Until last year, cyber criminals were only targeting computers of individuals and organisations with ransomware and holding them for ransom, but then they started targeting unprotected online databases and servers around the globe for ransom as well. Earlier this year, we saw notorious incidents where tens of thousands of unprotected MongoDB and Elasticsearch databases were hacked and held for ransom in exchange of the data the hackers had stolen and deleted from the poorly configured systems. Now, cyber crooks have started targeting unprotected Hadoop Clusters and CouchDB servers as well, making the ransomware game nastier if your servers are not securely configured. Nearly 4,500 servers with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) — the primary distributed storage used by Hadoop applications — were found exposing more than 5,000 Terabytes (5.12 Petabytes) of data, according to an analysis conducted using Shodan search engine. This exposure is due to the same issue — H...

The biggest mistake companies make with data security is leaving all their secrets unprotected at one place, which if attacked, they are all gone in one shot. An unnamed law enforcement agency has reportedly accessed billions of compromised usernames, email IDs, and their passwords, collected by LeakedSource, a popular breach notification service. LeakedSource, launched in late 2015, that exposed some of the largest data breaches in 2016, including LinkedIn , DailyMotion , Rambler.ru , Last.fm , VK.com , Weebly, and Foursquare , might be facing a permanent shut down after law enforcement officers allegedly raided its operator. The LeakedSource website that allowed visitors to look up for their account details that had been collected from multiple data breaches has suddenly disappeared, and its associated social media accounts have been suspended. The data breach aggregation service had always been criticized for its unethical policy of allowing anyone to look up hacked acco...

The ransomware attacks on poorly secured MongoDB installations have doubled in just a day. A hacker going by the handle Harak1r1 is accessing, copying and deleting unpatched or badly-configured MongoDB databases and then threatening administrators to ransom in exchange of the lost data. It all started on Monday when security researcher Victor Gevers identified nearly 200 instances of a MongoDB installation that have been erased and held for ransom , asking victims to pay hefty ransoms for the data to be restored. By Tuesday, this number reached approximately 2,000 databases as reported by Shodan Founder John Matherly, and by Friday, Gevers and fellow security researcher Niall Merrigan updated this count to 10,500. However, according to recent statistics compiled by Merrigan, the number of compromised systems have reached more than double to 27,000, over the course of about 12 hours. What's worse? Initial attacks saw ransoms of 0.2 Bitcoins (nearly US$184) to the ...

If you invite guest users into your Entra ID tenant, you may be opening yourself up to a surprising risk.  A gap in access control in Microsoft Entra's subscription handling is allowing guest users to create and transfer subscriptions into the tenant they are invited into, while maintaining full ownership of them.  All the guest user needs are the permissions to create subscriptions in their home tenant, and an invitation as a guest user into an external tenant. Once inside, the guest user can create subscriptions in their home tenant, transfer them into the external tenant, and retain full ownership rights. This stealthy privilege escalation tactic allows a guest user to gain a privileged foothold in an environment where they should only have limited access. Many organizations treat guest accounts as low-risk based on their temporary, limited access, but this behavior, which works as designed, opens the door to known attack paths and lateral movement within the resource t...

BREAKING: A misconfigured database has resulted in the exposure of around 191 Million voter records including voters' full names, their home addresses, unique voter IDs, date of births and phone numbers. The database was discovered on December 20th by Chris Vickery , a white hat hacker, who was able to access over 191 Million Americans' personal identifying information (PII) that are just sitting in the public to be found by anyone looking for it. Vickery is the same security researcher who uncovered personal details of 13 Million MacKeeper users two weeks ago, which included names, email addresses, usernames, password hashes, IP addresses, phone numbers, and system information. However, the recent discovery made him shocked when he saw his own information in the database, according to DataBreaches.net, whom the researcher contacted and provided all the details about his finding. 300GB Trove of Voters' Information Leaked Vickery has his hands on all ...

It's a bad day for Sony yesterday!! Sony appears to be hacked once again by hackers, but this time not its PlayStation , instead its Sony Pictures Entertainment – the company's motion picture, television production and distribution unit. According to multiple reports, the corporate computers of Sony Picture employees in New York and around the world were infiltrated by a hacker, displaying a weird skeleton, a series of URL addresses, and a threatening message that reads: "Hacked By #GOP Warning: We've already warned you, and this is just a beginning. We continue till our request be met. We've obtained all your internal data, including your secrets and top secrets. If you don't obey us, we'll release data shown below to the world. Determine what will you do till November the 24th, 11:00 PM (GMT)." News broke after a user, who claimed to be a former Sony staff, posted allegations of the security breach with the defacement image on Reddit . Hack...

Oracle's newly launched Data Redaction security feature in Oracle Database 12c can be easily disrupted by an attacker without any need to use exploit code, a security researcher long known as a thorn in Oracle's side said at Defcon. Data Redaction is one of the new Advanced Security features introduced in Oracle Database 12c. The service is designed to allow administrators to automatically protect sensitive data, such as credit card numbers or health information, during certain operations by either totally obscuring column data or partially masking it. But according to David Litchfield , a self-taught security researcher who found dozens and dozens of critical vulnerabilities in Oracle's products, a close look at this Data Redaction security feature help him found a slew of trivially exploitable vulnerabilities that an attacker don't even need to execute native exploit code to defeat the feature. David Litchfield is a security specialist at Datacomm TSS and th...