Security News

GitHub has announced the general availability of three significant improvements to npm, aiming to make using the software more secure and manageable. In summary, the new features include a more streamlined login and publishing experience, the ability to link Twitter and GitHub accounts to npm, and a new package signature verification system.

Like last time, they created an HTML email with a clickable link that itself looked like a URL, even though the actual URL it linked to was not the one that appeared in the text. This time the link you saw if you hovered over the blue text in the email really was a link to a URL hosted on the facebook.com domain.

The maintainers of the official third-party software repository for Python have begun imposing a new two-factor authentication condition for projects deemed "Critical." "We've begun rolling out a 2FA requirement: soon, maintainers of critical projects must have 2FA enabled to publish, update, or modify them," Python Package Index said in a tweet last week.

Although many community members praised the move, the developer of a popular Python project decided to delete his code from PyPI and republish it to invalidate the "Critical" status assigned to his project. We've begun rolling out a 2FA requirement: soon, maintainers of critical projects must have 2FA enabled to publish, update, or modify them.

You don't want that, but how do you prevent such a reality? One way is to enable two-factor authentication on the server. How do you set up SSH 2FA on your Ubuntu Server? Let me show you.

At 19 minutes after 3 o'clock UK time today , the criminals behind this scam registered a generic and unexceptionable domain name of the form control-XXXXX.com, where XXXXX was a random-looking string of digits, looking like a sequence number or a server ID:. 28 minutes later, at 15:47 UK time, we received an email, linking to a server called facebook. We've highlighted the error message "Password incorrect", which comes up whatever you type in, followed by a repeat of the password page, which then accepts whatever you type in.

A new Android banking malware named Revive has been discovered that impersonates a 2FA application required to log into BBVA bank accounts in Spain. The new banking trojan follows a more focused approach targeting the BBVA bank instead of attempting to compromise customers of multiple financial institutes.

Single factor authentication has been the standard for many years on Internet-facing services, but it clearly lacks security. While 2FA drastically increases the security of Internet services, it can still be bypassed by some methods.

The Federal Trade Commission has fined Twitter $150 million for using phone numbers and email addresses collected to enable two-factor authentication for targeted advertising. "As the complaint notes, Twitter obtained data from users on the pretext of harnessing it for security purposes but then ended up also using the data to target users with ads. This practice affected more than 140 million Twitter users, while boosting Twitter's primary source of revenue," said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan.

Today, GitHub has launched a new public beta to notably improve the two-factor authentication experience for all npm user accounts. Myles Borins, Open Source Product Manager at GitHub, said that the code hosting platform now allows npm accounts to register "Multiple second factors, such as security keys, biometric devices, and authentication applications."