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Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Cyber Data Breaches


NBN on its way to The Lodge but Malcolm Turnbull's neighbours aren't so lucky




Snap’s market value loses $1.3 billion after Kylie Jenner tweets that she hasn’t used Snapchat in a while.

↩︎ Bloomberg




Biohacker regrets past stunts—like self-injecting CRISPR—and says marginalized biohackers may hurt themselves.
↩︎ The Atlantic
Via LLRX – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health/medical, to name but a few. On a weekly basis, MEdia Dragon, Pete Weiss, highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways our privacy and security is challenged and diminished, often without our situational awareness.


Ars Technica  February 22, 2018
The Stuxnet worm that targeted Iran's nuclear program almost a decade ago was a watershed piece of malware for a variety of reasons. Chief among them, its use of cryptographic certificates belonging to legitimate companies to falsely vouch for the trustworthiness of the malware. Last year, we learned that fraudulently signed malware was more widespread than previously believed. On Thursday, researchers unveiled one possible reason: underground services that since 2011 have sold counterfeit signing credentials that are unique to each buyer. In many cases, the certificates are required to install software on Windows and macOS computers, while in others, they prevent the OSes from displaying warnings that the software comes from an untrusted developer. The certificates also increase the chances that antivirus programs won't flag previously unseen files as malicious. A report published by threat intelligence provider Recorded Future said that starting last year, researchers saw a sudden increase in fraudulent certificates issued by browser- and operating system-trusted providers that were being used to sign malicious wares. The spike drove Recorded Future researchers to investigate the cause. What they found was surprising.

*Last week, “On February 20, 2018 the Securities and Exchange Commission voted unanimously to approve a statement and interpretive guidance to assist public companies in preparing disclosures about cybersecurity risks and incidents. 


Nextgov
The growing internet of things and increasingly sophisticated malware are putting global organizations at a greater risk for cyberattacks, but leaders aren’t doing enough to bolster their groups’ security, according to a pair of reports. Researchers at Raytheon and the Ponemon Institute found more than 80 percent of cybersecurity and IT experts predict unsecured internet of things devices will cause a potentially “catastrophic” data breach at their organizations within the next three years. Two-thirds of respondents also expect to see an increase in ransomware attacks between now and 2021, and 60 percent said nation-state attacks will intensify during that period and potentially lead to a cyber war. The study was conducted in late 2017 and included perspectives from more than 1,100 senior IT specialists from the U.S., Europe, Middle East and North Africa.

Ars Technica
February 20, 2018
Add Tesla to the legion of organizations that have been infected by cryptocurrency-mining malware. In a report published Tuesday, researchers at security firm RedLock said hackers accessed one of Tesla's Amazon cloud accounts and used it to run currency-mining software. The researchers said the breach in many ways resembled compromises suffered by Gemalto, the world's biggest SIM card maker, and multinational insurance company Aviva. In October, RedLock said Amazon and Microsoft cloud accounts for both companies were breached to run currency-mining malware after hackers found access credentials that weren't properly secured. The initial point of entry for the Tesla cloud breach, Tuesday's report said, was an unsecured administrative console for Kubernetes, an open source package used by companies to deploy and manage large numbers of cloud-based applications and resources.