Security News
A prominent Chinese tech CEO has cited human error as the likely reason hackers got their hands on the personal data of 1 billion people in China from a Shanghai police database and then put some of it up for sale on illicit online markets. An annual report on data breaches by Verizon-the 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report-cited the "Human element" as responsible for 82 percent of the breaches analyzed by researchers, with 13 percent directly attributed to human error.
An employee of OpenSea's email delivery vendor Customer.io "Misused" their access to download and share OpenSea users' and newsletter subscribers' email addresses "With an unauthorized external party," Head of Security Cory Hardman warned on Wednesday. "If you have shared your email with OpenSea in the past, you should assume you were impacted," Hardman continued.
Microsoft announced today the general availability of tenant-wide idle session timeout for Microsoft 365 web apps to protect confidential data on shared or non-company devices left unattended. After an IT admin such as a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 global admin enables this new feature, users who have reached the configured period of inactivity will be notified that they're going to be automatically signed out.
The Conti ransomware operation has finally shut down its last public-facing infrastructure, consisting of two Tor servers used to leak data and negotiate with victims, closing the final chapter of the notorious cybercrime brand. Conti left one member behind to continue leaking data and taunting Costa Rica to create a facade of a running operation while its members quietly moved to other ransomware gangs.
India's government last week issued confidential information security guidelines to the 30 million plus workers it employs - and as if to prove a point, the document quickly leaked on a government website. The document, and the measures it contains, suggest infosec could be somewhat loose across India's government sector.
Researchers at security product recommendation service Safety Detectives claim they've found almost a million customer records wide open on an Elasticsearch server run by Malaysian point-of-sale software vendor StoreHub. Safety Detectives' report states it found a StoreHub sever that stored unencrypted data and was not password protected.
Researchers at the University of Hamburg in Germany have conducted a field experiment capturing hundreds of thousands of passersby's WiFi connection probe requests to determine the type of data transmitted without the device owners realizing it. WiFi probing is a standard process, part of the bilateral communication required between a smartphone and an access point to establish a connection.
An analysis of leaked chats from the notorious Conti ransomware group earlier this year has revealed that the syndicate has been working on a set of firmware attack techniques that could offer a path to accessing privileged code on compromised devices. "Control over firmware gives attackers virtually unmatched powers both to directly cause damage and to enable other long-term strategic goals," firmware and hardware security firm Eclypsium said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
Several U.S. federal agencies warned organizations today against paying ransom demands made by the Karakurt gang since that will not prevent their stolen data from being sold to others. Karakurt, the data extortion arm of the Conti ransomware gang and cybercrime syndicate, is focused on stealing data from companies since at least June 2021 and forcing them into paying ransoms under the threat of publishing the information online.
The Versus Market, one of the most popular English-speaking criminal darknet markets, is shutting down after discovering a severe exploit that could have allowed access to its database and exposed the IP address of its servers. Apparently, after finding these vulnerabilities, the operators of Versus have decided to pull the plug themselves, finding it too risky to continue.