BACKGROUND: As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the Biden administration is preparing an array of actions, including sanctions, to make it harder for hackers to use digital currency to profit from ransomware attacks, according to people familiar with the matter. The US government hopes to choke off access to a form of payment that has supported a booming criminal industry and a rising national security threat.
ISBuzz Team
BACKGROUND: Inside Radio is reporting: Marketron Hit With Cyberattack. Virtually All Of Its Systems Are Offline. Marketron manages $5 billion in annual U.S. advertising revenue. Service to all 6,000 customers has been shut down, all services offline. CEO Jim Howard told customers Sunday night of a breach by “the Russian criminal organization BlackMatter.” Updated company breach announcement here. Five of our experts commenting below.
BACKGROUND: Move over ransomware! “Smishing”, a form of “phishing” using SMS or text messages instead of email messages, is taking over and threatening millions of consumers and small businesses around the world. Below are the expert comments on the danger of Smishing and how best to avoid it.
BACKGROUND: Travis CI exposes private creds of thousands of open source projects that rely on the service. Twitter user @peter_szilagyi Tweeted on Tuesday that “Between the 3 Sept and 10 Sept, secure env vars of *all* public @travisci repositories were injected into PR builds. Signing keys, access creds, API tokens. Felix Lange found this on the 7th and we’ve notified @travisci within the hour. Their only response being “Oops, please rotate the keys”, ignoring that *all* their infra was leaking. Not getting through, we’ve started reaching out to @github to have Travis blacklisted.” Needless to say, the community is livid!
According to the 2021 IBM Security X-Force Cloud Threat Landscape Report, over half of breaches were the result of shadow IT and two-thirds of improperly configured APIs accounted for most cloud security incidents in last year.
BACKGROUND: Epik, the Right-Winged domain registrar, has notified users of a security breach after Anonymous claimed to have stolen “a decades worth of data” from the web registration company. Rob Monster, Founder and CEO of Epik Holdings, responded to claims of the breach on Twitter.
BACKGROUND: Three former intelligence operatives are to pay $1.6M to resolve criminal charges after working as mercenary hackers for the United Arab Emirates government. The U.S. government has entered a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) with the defendants – Marc Baier, Ryan Adams, and Daniel Gericke – who, between 2016 and 2019, provided their services to a company that ran sophisticated hacking operations for the UAE government against various targets. The defendants were part of a clandestine unit named Project Raven, which helped the UAE spy on its enemies.
It has been announced by Microsoft that users can now delete all passwords from their accounts and instead log in using an authenticator app or other solution. If passwordless login is enabled, users re-logging into a Microsoft account will be asked to give their fingerprint, or other secure unlock, on their mobile phone.
In its first update since 2017, the OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks 2021 has been published for peer review.