Hacking, Security & Privacy News - Page 15

Intel is set to go through another battle with security holes in its CPUs with a revised version of Spectre found, with 8 new Spectre-like issues discovered.

Spectre Next Generation, or Spectre NG is what it's called, with Intel recently being notified of the security holes. 4 of them were rated high, while the remaining 4 were medium severity. The technical details behind Spectre NG haven't been announced, but we know that they will be similar or worse than the original Spectre, which was bad enough.

Intel is reportedly working on getting Spectre Next Generation problems fixed, with Microsoft and others working on OS level adjustments. There will reportedly be two new waves of updates, with the first coming soon and another reportedly in August, but these dates could vary depending on how bad Spectre NG really is.

Twitter has been hit in a big way today, with the social networking giant urging all of its 330 million users to change their passwords immediately after they were exposed in a bug in plain text.

The company wasn't hacked at all, with Twitter recommending people change their passwords out of an "abundance of caution". Twitter wants you to change your password on the site itself, and anywhere else that you've used that password, including third-party Twitter apps.

How did it happen? Well, Twitter says that the bug occurred through an issue in the hashing process, where it masks passwords by replacing them with a random string of characters that then get sorted on Twitter's system. An error in this process happened, so the passwords were then saved in plain text to an internal log. Twitter says they found the bug on their own, and removed the passwords and is working on it so it doesn't happen again.

It looks like hackers have breached the armor of Under Armour, the athletic apparel brand, with the data breach exposing details of over 150 million MyFitnessPal users.

The data breach exposes MyFitnessPal users' usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords. Government-issued identifiers such as social security numbers and drivers licenses weren't exposed, as the app doesn't collect that sort of data, including credit cards.

The intrusion was detected in late-February, but Under Armour began working with authorities on March 25. Under Armour purchased MyFitnessPal in 2015 for $475 million.

As we get closer to the next Olympics, Japan is searching for new ways to beef up the security of their facilities but at the same time make sure that the increase of security doesn't hinder the process of getting inside of the Olympic venues.

The Japan Times has reported that sources close to the Olympic committee have said that there is speculation of facial recognition type technology to be used as security for the expected 300,000 to 400,000 attendees. If chosen as the select approach it has been said that it will not be used on spectators but instead could reduce the wait time of attendees such as officials and coaches.

There has been no official confirmation of if this technology will be implemented, so all concerns revolving around privacy have not been addressed yet. As we move closer to the beginning of the 2020 Olympics it is assumed that we will be updated with a confirmation announcement for if facial recognition is go or not.

TIO Networks is a telecom, wireless, cable and utility network operator in North America that also offers bill payment services, earlier this year PayPal purchased this company for $233 million and now it has come out that TIO network has had their data compromised. PayPal announced on November 10th that there was a potential breach in the TIO network but now has later confirmed that they "identified a potential compromise of personally identifiable information for approximately 1.6 million customers."

Thankfully PayPal's systems are not linked in anyway to that of TIO Networks as PayPal reassures customers that their data remains in secure hands.

"A review of TIO's network has identified a potential compromise of personally identifiable information for approximately 1.6 million customers. The PayPal platform is not impacted in any way, as the TIO systems are completely separate from the PayPal network, and PayPal's customers' data remains secure."

Nghia Pho, a former NSA employee has pleaded guilty to taking home classified information that was soon after linked to a hack from Russian intelligence. Pho will be sentenced on April 6th and has had his maximum penalty capped at 8 years, which would usually be 10 years.

According to sources of The New York Times, Pho stole the information both in physical and digital form between 2010 and 2015, then proceeded to intentionally use this information to then rewrite his resume. The hack came through exploited Kaspersky anti-virus software which the company was not aware of at the time. Kaspersky was aware that it has held NSA data but it is not clear whether it was that specific data or not.

Recently the NSA has had to deal with many leaks, scrambling to fix all these leaks could either motivate others to come forward and blow the whistle, or they could see Pho be made an example of, putting fear into others that were considering coming forward because of the penalty.

Back in 2014 Yahoo experienced a hack that exposed close to 500 million accounts, and now a Canadian citizen has just recently pleaded guilty to assisting a Russian intelligence officers in the hack. 22-year-old Karim Baratov has been arrested while another three individuals are facing charges back in Russia.

Prosecutors have stated that two of the Russian hackers are working for the Russian spy agency FSB, while the third is known Russian hacker Alexsey Belan. Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin are believed to have directed the attack and are also the ones that contacted Baratov when their targets were compromised with email accounts outside of Yahoos system. California's U.S Attorney's Office dives deeper into the details of the case, fleshing out the scope of abundant charges.

"According to his plea agreement, Baratov's role in the charged conspiracy was to hack webmail accounts of individuals of interest to the FSB and send those accounts' passwords to Dokuchaev in exchange for money. As alleged in the indictment, Dokuchaev, Sushchin, and Belan compromised Yahoo's network and gained the ability to access Yahoo accounts. When they desired access to individual webmail accounts at a number of other internet service providers, such as Google and Yandex (based in Russia), Dokuchaev tasked Baratov to compromise such accounts."

For a spy agency that has the word 'security' in its title, the National Security Agency seems to be worse than a teenager downloading MP3s from LimeWire. The NSA has been busted again exposing top secret data to people, this time on the cloud.

UpGuard Director of Cyber Risk Research Chris Vickery discovered back on September 27 an Amazon Web Services S3 cloud storage bucket that was configured for totally open public access. This means that anyone can enter the URL and see what's inside of trhe bucket, which was located on the AWS subdomain "inscom". This folder had 47 viewable files and other folders inside, three of which could be downloaded.

INSCOM is the intelligence command that is controlled by both the US Army, and the NSA. The worst part of this news is that the folder wasn't password protected, which seems awfully stupid (there are worse words) of the NSA.

Imgur has fallen victim to a data breach attack, following the recent hack and cover up from Uber, usernames and passwords have been compromised, totaling to 1.7 million user accounts.

This breach on Imgur has been reported to of happened in 2014 and only has just come to company's attention now. Responding quickly, Roy Sehgal, Chief Operating Officer released a statement on behalf of Imgur, saying that the company is investigating the origin of the hack and that it is possible that the hack occurred due to an "old algorithm that was used at the time."

"We are still investigating how the account information was compromised. We have always encrypted your password in our database, but it may have been cracked with brute force due to an older hashing algorithm (SHA-256) that was used at the time. We updated our algorithm to the new bcrypt algorithm last year. We recommend that you use a different combination of email and password for every site and application. Please always use strong passwords and update them frequently."

It seems we can't go a week without a major breach in security at a huge company, with T-Mobile's website now reportedly hacked and the data from 76 million of its users could be exposed.

Security researcher Karak Saini discovered the bug in the wsg.t-mobile.com API, where if someone searched for someone else's number, the API sending back the data would include that users' data. The data in question included users' email addresses, IMSI network code, billing account data, and more. All hackers had to do was know, or guess a user's phone number, and they could have virtually all of that person's information, and more.

Saini spoke with Motherboard, where he said: "T-Mobile has 76 million customers, and an attacker could have ran a script to scrape the data (email, name, billing account number, IMSI number, other numbers under the same account which are usually family members) from all 76 million of these customers to create a searchable database with accurate and up-to-date information of all users".