government computers hacking | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A massive government data belonging to the Oklahoma Department of Securities (ODS) was left unsecured on a storage server for at least a week, exposing a whopping 3 terabytes of data containing millions of sensitive files. The unsecured storage server, discovered by Greg Pollock , a researcher with cybersecurity firm UpGuard, also contained decades worth of confidential case files from the Oklahoma Securities Commission and many sensitive FBI investigations—all wide open and accessible to anyone without any password. Other severe files exposed included emails, social security numbers, names, and addresses of 10,000 brokers, credentials for remote access to ODS workstations, and communications meant for the Oklahoma Securities Commission, along with a list of identifiable information related to AIDS patients. While the researcher doesn't know exactly how long the server was open to the public, the Shodan search engine revealed that the server had been publicly open since at...

The web gateway used to render materials for Federal Background Investigations for employees and contractors has been shut down for several weeks after a vulnerability was detected, the Office of Personnel Management announced. The agency announced the shut down citing the discovery of a vulnerability in its Electronic Questionnaires for Investigations Processing (E-QIP) system while conducting an internal review of the agency's security. As a result, OPM has temporarily suspended the E-QIP system for four to six weeks, and OPM Director Katherine Archuleta said the system would remain offline "until stronger security enhancements are implemented." In the Wake of Massive Breach Although the agency stressed that it had not detected any malicious activity or evidence of hackers actually exploiting the flaw. The internal review of the agency's information technology systems was ordered by Archuleta in the wake of massive cyber attacks on the OPM...

The latest Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report found that sensitive data is found in 66% of cloud storage buckets. This data is vulnerable to ransomware attacks. The SANS Institute recently reported that these attacks can be performed by abusing the cloud provider's storage security controls and default settings. "In just the past few months, I have witnessed two different methods for executing a ransomware attack using nothing but legitimate cloud security features," warns Brandon Evans, security consultant and SANS Certified Instructor. Halcyon disclosed an attack campaign that leveraged one of Amazon S3's native encryption mechanisms, SSE-C, to encrypt each of the target buckets. A few months prior, security consultant Chris Farris demonstrated how attackers could perform a similar attack using a different AWS security feature, KMS keys with external key material, using simple scripts generated by ChatGPT. "Clearly, this topic is top-of-mind for both threat actors and ...