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Akasa Air, India's newest commercial airline, exposed the personal data belonging to its customers that the company blamed on a technical configuration error. According to security researcher Ashutosh Barot , the issue is rooted in the account registration process, leading to the exposure of details such as names, gender, email addresses, and phone numbers. The bug was identified on August 7, 2022, the same day the low-cost airline commenced its operations in the country. "I found an HTTP request which gave my name, email, phone number, gender, etc. in JSON format," Barot  said  in a write-up. "I immediately changed some parameters in [the] request and I was able to see other user's PII. It took around ~30 minutes to find this issue." Upon receiving the report, the company  said  it temporarily shut down parts of its system to incorporate additional security guardrails. It has also reported the incident to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Monday warned of cyber criminals increasingly exploiting flaws in decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms to plunder cryptocurrency. "The FBI has observed cyber criminals exploiting vulnerabilities in the smart contracts governing DeFi platforms to steal investors' cryptocurrency," the agency  said  in a notification. Attackers are said to have used different methods to hack and steal cryptocurrency from DeFi platforms, including initiating flash loans that trigger exploits in the platforms' smart contracts and exploiting signature verification flaws in their token bridge to withdraw all investments. The agency has also observed criminals defrauding the platforms by manipulating cryptocurrency price pairs – assets that can be traded for each other on an exchange – by exploiting a series of vulnerabilities to bypass  slippage checks  and steal roughly $35 million in digital funds. It further said that the threat a...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Monday said it filed a lawsuit against Kochava, a location data broker, for collecting and selling precise geolocation data gathered from consumers' mobile devices. The complaint alleges that the U.S. company  amasses  a "wealth of information" about users by purchasing data from other data brokers to sell to its own clients. "Kochava then sells customized data feeds to its clients to, among other purposes, assist in advertising and analyzing foot traffic at stores or other locations," the FTC  said . "Among other categories, Kochava sells timestamped latitude and longitude coordinates showing the location of mobile devices." The Idaho-based company advertises itself as a "real-time data solutions company" and the "largest independent data marketplace for connected devices." It also claims its  Kochava Collective  data marketplace provides "premium data feeds, audience targeting, a...

A new ransomware strain written in Golang dubbed " Agenda " has been spotted in the wild, targeting healthcare and education entities in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Thailand. "Agenda can reboot systems in safe mode, attempts to stop many server-specific processes and services, and has multiple modes to run," Trend Micro researchers  said  in an analysis last week. Qilin, the threat actor advertising the ransomware on the dark web, is said to provide affiliates with options to tailor the binary payloads for each victim, enabling the operators to decide the ransom note, encryption extension, as well as the list of processes and services to terminate before commencing the encryption process. Additionally, the ransomware incorporates techniques for detection evasion by taking advantage of the 'safe mode' feature of a device to proceed with its file encryption routine unnoticed, but not before changing the default user's password and enabl...

A Turkish-speaking entity called Nitrokod has been attributed to an active cryptocurrency mining campaign that involves impersonating a desktop application for Google Translate to infect over 111,000 victims in 11 countries since 2019.  "The malicious tools can be used by anyone," Maya Horowitz, vice president of research at Check Point, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "They can be found by a simple web search, downloaded from a link, and installation is a simple double-click." The list of countries with victims includes the U.K., the U.S., Sri Lanka, Greece, Israel, Germany, Turkey, Cyprus, Australia, Mongolia, and Poland. The  campaign  entails serving malware through free software hosted on popular sites such as Softpedia and Uptodown. But in an interesting tactic, the malware puts off its execution for weeks and separates its malicious activity from the downloaded fake software to avoid detection. The installation of the infected program...