Security News
The Twittersphere went into overdrive on Wednesday as a bunch of prominent, verified Twitter accounts were hijacked and started promoting a COVID-19 cryptocurrency giveaway scam. The attackers simultaneously compromised Twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, Apple, Uber, as well as those of cryptocurrency exchanges Binance, Coinbase, KuCoin and Gemini, the CoinDesk news site and other top crypto accounts.
A number of high profile Twitter accounts, including Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Apple, were breached on Wednesday. Twitter said in an official statement: "We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts Twitter accounts. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly".
The Twitter accounts of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and other celebrities were briefly taken over on Wednesday, along with the accounts of various cryptocurrency businesses and affiliated executives, to promote a Bitcoin scam. Twitter also silenced verified blue-tick accounts temporarily to prevent more abuse while it got to the bottom of the kerfuffle.
Most cloud services keep their DNS cache times, known in the jargon as TTLs or time-to-live entries, pretty small these days in order to help their services adapt more quickly to changes in network load. Hacking your DNS entries is not quite as good a result for the crooks as taking over your actual web server - they won't have your web certificate to authenticate HTTPS traffic, and they'd need to clone a huge amount of your site to make a realistic facsimile - but it's still extremely dangerous, and potentially very damaging for your brand. In the cases tracked by Edwards, it seems that a bunch of crooks have been keeping their eyes on unused Azure server names that still have trusted DNS records referring to them, and reviving those defunct server names to produce believable URLs for scams and malware campaigns.
Travelex has paid out $2.3 million in Bitcoin to hackers to regain access to its global network after a malware attack at the new year knocked the global currency exchange offline and crippled its business during the month of January. Travelex said in this case it was experts who advised the company pay those responsible for the New Year's Eve attack, which forced the company to shut down its online services and its mobile app.
A huge BGP hijack by Russian state telecommunications provider Rostelecom diverted the traffic from more than 200 networks - including Google, Amazon, Facebook and Cloudflare - to Russian servers on April 1. Internet traffic routes are managed by the Border Gateway Protocol, which controls the way in which internet traffic moves from one autonomous system network to the next on its way to its destination.
As of Tuesday, hijacked Twitter accounts were spewing out hundreds of tweets hawking a dodgy looking face mask/toilet paper/digital forehead thermometer online store, according to Motherboard's Vice. On Tuesday, the journalist confirmed on Twitter that his account had been hijacked and used to send out direct messages, purportedly about face masks.
There are more than 600 legitimate Microsoft subdomains that can be hijacked and abused for phishing, malware delivery and scams, researchers warned this week. Researchers at Vullnerability, a company that specializes in exploit and vulnerability alerting services, have created an automated system that scanned all the subdomains of some important Microsoft domains.
Well, you shouldn't have, because the pair were among sub-domains hijacked by vulnerability researchers to prove Microsoft is lax with its own online security. Now, as we said, Microsoft has loads of these sub-domains, and after a while it just stops updating some of them and abandons them.
Last Friday, in full glare of the world, Facebook admins suddenly found themselves in an unseemly struggle to wrestle back control of the company's Twitter accounts from attackers that had defaced them. Well even Facebook is hackable but at least their security better than Twitter.