The outbreak of COVID-19 has changed the way we work in its entirety. Remote working is now being enforced, with organisations being told to keep all their workforces at home wherever possible. Remote working has its advantages, but unfortunately, we have also seen a sharp increase in the number of ransomware cases since the enforcement of the new remote working rules. Employees worldwide are working under a completely different set of parameters; ones where new security risks are high and where cybercriminals are finding new ways to exploit any weaknesses they can find. With these new parameters comes new habits,…
ISBuzz Team
A new whitepaper on the cost of criminal services has revealed that, over the past five years due to supply and demand, the prices for botnet rentals and credit card numbers have taken a nosedive. Ransomware-as-a-service prices still start at $5 with Crypterlocker, which has been around since 2013, continuing to demand a high price (around $100), but copies of driver’s licenses, passports and bill statements start at $5 – similar to prices in 2015, while United States credit cards, which were sold at $20 in 2015, now start at just $1.
A database containing over 26 million unique LiveJournal user accounts, including plain text passwords, is being shared for free on multiple hacker forums. For some time, rumours have been circulating that LiveJournal was breached in 2014 and account credentials for 33 million users were stolen. Since approximately May 8th, 2020, links to a data dump allegedly containing 33,717,787 unique accounts have been circulating on various hacker forums. The passwords were converted to plain text after initially being stored as MD5 hashes. https://twitter.com/ZblogWebsite/status/1265695722181029889
Late last week Bank of America Corporation disclosed a data breach affecting clients who have applied for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Client information was exposed on April 22 when the bank uploaded PPP applicants’ details onto the US Small Business Administration’s test platform. The platform was designed to give lenders the opportunity to test the PPP submissions before the second round of applications kicked off. The breach was revealed in a filing made by Bank of America with the California Attorney General’s Office. As a result of the incident, other SBA-authorized lenders and their vendors were able to view clients’ information.
48 per cent of office workers have admitted they are less likely to follow safe data practices when working from home, according to new research from Tessian, the Human Layer Security company. The State of Data Loss Prevention report reveals findings from a global survey of 2,000 office workers and 250 IT decision-makers in the UK and the US. The research shows that 52 per cent of office workers feel they can get away with riskier behaviour when working from home, such as sharing confidential files via email and using personal devices to conduct company business. The top reasons for not following safe…
Remote workers have been targeted by up to 65,000 Google-brand impersonation attacks, according to the most recent ‘Threat Spotlight’ report from Barracuda Networks. This type of spear phishing scam uses branded sites to trick victims into sharing login credentials. Of the nearly 100,000 form-based attacks Barracuda detected between January 1, 2020, and April 30, 2020, Google file sharing and storage websites were used in 65 per cent of attacks. This includes storage.googleapis.com (25 per cent), docs.google.com (23 per cent), storage.cloud.google.com (13 per cent), and drive.google.com (4 per cent).
A critical vulnerability found in Android devices could potentially be exploited to hijack virtually all mobile apps, according to SC Magazine. This elevation-of-privilege vulnerability could be exploited without root access or user permission, allowing hackers to spy on individuals or steal their login credentials. While Android 10 is not affected by the vulnerability, Google has developed a security patch for Android versions 8, 8.1 and 9, which was released the general public as part of its May Security Bulletin. However, mobile security experts point out that Android versions prior to 8 remain endangered, and they note that availability of patches may…
As reported by the Daily Mail, a full leaked version of the upcoming operating system for iPhone and iPad appears to trace back to China, where an anonymous individual purchased a developer’s version of the iPhone 11 with a test version of iOS 14 installed on it. The pre-release software quickly spread through hacker networks, and has driven a torrent of rumours and leaks about new features throughout the spring. According to a report in Vice, the version obtained by the hacker is dated to December 2019, and was intended to be used only by app developers working on software for iPhone or iPad.
ESET researchers have uncovered a new version of one of the oldest malware families run by the Turla group, the ComRAT backdoor. Turla, also known as Snake, is an infamous cyber-espionage group that has been active for more than ten years. The most interesting feature of the updated backdoor is its use of the Gmail web UI to receive commands and exfiltrate data. ComRAT steals sensitive documents, and since 2017 it has attacked at least three governmental institutions. ESET has found indications that this latest version of ComRAT was still in use at the beginning of 2020, showing that the…
A hacker has stolen at least 31 SQL databases containing 1,620,000 (1.6 million) rows of information relating to the customers of online shops. The hacker is offering samples of the data which, depending on the online shop, may reveal full names, usernames, email addresses, dates of birth, physical addresses, gender, account status, history and more, from each of the extorted e-commerce websites to prove the validity of the data and ramp up the pressure that is exerted on the database owners.