Category Archives: Data Breach

Network Safety: Experts Weigh In

Posted on July 5, 2017 | 1 comment

If you missed our Cybersecurity Session “Cybersecurity for CEO’s- The Game Has Changed” at The NAA Education Conference, no worries. Our friends at Multi-Housing News have published a great article for you. Special thanks to Sanyu Kyeyune for attending our session and writing the article.

At NAA’s recent conference in Atlanta, panelists shared best practices for keeping vital network information safe from attack.

The panel included Chad Hunt, supervisory special agent with the FBI; Dave McKenna, CEO of ResMan; Frank Santini, cybersecurity attorney of Trenam Law; Jeremy Rasmussen, cybersecurity director of Abacode; and Michael Reese, Chief Information Officer of USA Properties Fund, who moderated the session.

Reese opened the talk by underscoring the commercial real estate industry’s vulnerability to cyber-attacks: “Real estate sits on a goldmine of information, including intellectual property, personally identifiable information—things hackers want to go after.”

Understand Data Value

The cost of stolen information for a single customer can fetch $10-20 on the dark net, but the liability to an organization is $158 or more. This greater figure reflects the cost to recover data, the value of this information to competitors and regulatory fines incurred. Multiply this number by 50,000 customers and the cost amounts to $7.9 million—enough to put some property management firms out of business.

C-suite leaders that understand the total costs of cybersecurity are in better shape to manage a firm’s cyber health. “As a leader, you can’t be afraid to raise the red flag. It’s your responsibility to defend your company and your partners.”

Crafting a risk-based approach helps companies decide on what to defend and how much to spend. This plan should include a guide for CEOs interacting with the media and attorneys working with incident response companies. “There is always a tradeoff between usability and security. That’s why you need to engage with a firm that can bake security into a product from chip to the enterprise level,” Rasmussen warned. “Don’t try to bolt it on at the end.”

Improve Network Visibility

Once the value of data has been quantified, the next step to addressing a company’s cyber health is to ask how secure networks currently are, because on average, noted Rasmussen, by the time a threat has been identified, it has been active for up to 270 days.

“A majority of clients lack visibility into their own networks,” Rasmussen explained. “In today’s world, it’s not a matter of if, it’s when. And not only that, but, are they already in?”

One of the most common software attacks uses ransomware, which encrypts files—effectively eliminating access to important data—and threatens to delete or publish them until the victim pays an agreed-upon sum. However, organization that already has solid system backups in place can combat ransomware by reverting back to previously stored versions. Along with ransomware, phishing attempts, social engineering, attacks on crucial infrastructure, financial fraud and “zero-day” vulnerability (a hole in security unknown to the vendor, typically identified and exploited by hackers over a short time frame) have emerged as some of the most damaging cybersecurity threats.

For some organizations, the expenses associated with downtime and productivity could be crippling. Therefore, advised McKenna, it is crucial to be proactive ahead of time, rather than after a threat has surfaced, to mitigate the cost of recovering from a cyber-attack. “It still comes down to your people not being victims,” he said. “The technology won’t do it all for you.”

According to Hunt, email is the most common point of entry for a cyber-attacker. Because emailing and phone calls already poke holes into a security system, organizations must be vigilant in managing these activities to avoid a breach. One way to do this is by focusing security training on individuals with elevated privileges, such as system administrators and C-suite users, which are hot targets for hackers.

Know Who to Call

“An order of operations might be to call your IT people to stop and contain the threat, contact your attorney to find out what the legal implications are around reporting, call your public relations firm to control the event in the media and then to contact law enforcement,” Rasmussen offered.

Company leadership should also rally IT teams to mandate routine password changes for all users and to require people to upgrade software instead of patching outdated platforms. It is also crucial to keep a list of key personnel to contact when an infiltration occurs. “Locally, the FBI is a good place to start, but you can also call the Secret Service in your area,” Hunt advised. “In either case, develop this personal relationship ahead of time, as local law enforcement has little authority at a corporate level.”

He also suggested that if a particular individual within an organization becomes the victim of a cyber-attack, then this person should file a police report to avoid being implicated as a perpetrator. When interacting with local authorities, Hunt added, it is most effective to do so in a controlled, documented manner.

“Thirteen years ago, there was much less information-sharing with law enforcement, but now it’s more of a two-way street,” Hunt explained. “The FBI can gather information without necessarily having to open a federal investigation.”

Santini encouraged leadership to secure a forensic investigator that will supervise the handling of evidence and assist in documentation—actions that can be helpful in the event of legal repercussions—and to ensure that attorney-client privilege keeps these interactions private.

Rally Vendors

Another important questions that C-suite leaders need to ask themselves is, “What are your partners and their partners doing to ensure cyber safety?”

McKenna emphasized that having a conversation with vendors and suppliers will help reinforce the company priorities, identify the degree of protection already in place and define a plan for handling an intrusion in the future. “You need to know if your vendor will indemnify you for the cost of a breach, if there is a mutual indemnification clause and what level of insurance the vendor requires of its partners,” Santini encouraged. “Make sure you have written agreements with your cloud provider and other suppliers, and negotiate these terms with the help of a lawyer.”

Ultimately, it is up to C-level employees to develop vendor relationships, rather than making cybersecurity a grassroots effort led by an IT department. “There needs to be a separation of duties, just like how a company might hire one accounting team for auditing and another for taxes,” said Rasmussen. “Cybersecurity should be handled the same way.”

Prioritize Efforts

The panel discussion concluded with a punch list of items to help C-level leaders put a cybersecurity plan into action. Here are some key features:

  • Detection using 24/7 monitoring and incident response to gain immediate feedback on the effect of a network security initiative
  • Implementation of organizational policy/procedures, which requires a cultural shift and buy-in from all members of an organization
  • Add-in of other annual assessments, such as penetration testing, phishing, etc., to improve visibility into a network
  • Engagement of IT teams to support continuous improvement and governance
  • Understanding of “zero-day” threats
  • Encouraging collaboration across all stakeholders

 

 

 

 

 

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CoPilot settles with New York AG for delaying breach notification for over one year

Posted on June 19, 2017 | Leave a comment

This is only the beginning of what will happen in the future.

It took over a year to notify 220,000 individuals of a breach to its website. HHS is determining if it’s a HIPAA-covered business associate.

CoPilot Provider Services has settled with New York for $130,000 in penalties for waiting more than a year to notify its customers of a breach to the company’s website, NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced Thursday.

The attorney general determined the healthcare administrative services and IT provider violated general business law, in its delayed breach notification to its 221,178 customers. CoPilot agreed to the monetary settlement and to reform its notification and legal compliance program.

The breach occurred in October 2015, when an unauthorized individual accessed confidential patient reimbursement data through the administration site. The hacker downloaded data that included names, birthdates, addresses, phone numbers and medical insurance card details.

However, CoPilot waited until January 2017 to begin formally notifying its customers of the breach.

The FBI began investigating the incident in February at CoPilot’s request, focusing on a former employee they believed was responsible.

CoPilot blamed the breach notification delay on the FBI investigation, but law enforcement didn’t say that customer notification would hinder the ongoing investigation and didn’t instruct CoPilot to delay. General business law instructs that companies must provide timely breach notification.

The Department of Health and Human Services is still looking into whether CoPilot is considered a covered business associate under HIPAA.

Thursday’s agreement also states that CoPilot will comply with New York’s consumer protection and data security laws.

“Healthcare services providers have a duty to protect patient records as securely as possible and to provide notice when a breach occurs,” said Schneiderman in a statement. “Waiting over a year to provide notice is unacceptable. My office will continue to hold businesses accountable to their responsibility to protect customers’ private information.”

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Chipotle says hackers hit most restaurants in data breach

Posted on May 30, 2017 | Leave a comment

Hackers used malware to steal customer payment data from most of Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc’s (CMG.N) restaurants over a span of three weeks, the company said on Friday, adding to woes at the chain whose sales had just started recovering from a string of food safety lapses in 2015.

Chipotle said it did not know how many payment cards or customers were affected by the breach that struck most of its roughly 2,250 restaurants for varying amounts of time between March 24 and April 18, spokesman Chris Arnold said via email.

A handful of Canadian restaurants were also hit in the breach, which the company first disclosed on April 25.

Stolen data included account numbers and internal verification codes. The malware has since been removed.

The information could be used to drain debit card-linked bank accounts, make “clone” credit cards, or to buy items on certain less-secure online sites, said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy at the non-profit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

The breach could once again threatens sales at its restaurants, which only recently recovered after falling sharply in late 2015 after Chipotle was linked to outbreaks of E. coli, salmonella and norovirus that sickened hundreds of people.

An investigation into the breach found the malware searched for data from the magnetic stripe of payment cards.

Arnold said Chipotle could not alert customers directly as it did not collect their names and mailing addresses at the time of purchase.

The company posted notifications on the Chipotle and Pizzeria Locale websites and issued a news release to make customers aware of the incident.

Linn Freedman, an attorney at Robinson & Cole LLP specializing in data breach response, said Chipotle was putting the burden on the consumer to discover possible fraudulent transactions by notifying them through the websites.

“I don’t think you will get to all of the customers who might have been affected,” she said.

Security analysts said Chipotle would likely face a fine based on the size of the breach and the number of records compromised.

“If your data was stolen through a data breach that means you were somewhere out of compliance” with payment industry data security standards, Julie Conroy, research director at Aite Group, a research and advisory firm.

“In this case, the card companies will fine Chipotle and also hold them liable for any fraud that results directly from their breach,” said Avivah Litan, a vice president at Gartner Inc (IT.N) specializing in security and privacy.

Chipotle did not immediately comment on the prospect of a fine.

Retailer Target Corp (TGT.N) in 2017 agreed to pay $18.5 million to settle claims stemming from a massive data breach in late 2013.

Hotels and restaurants have also been hit. They include Trump Hotels, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG.L) as well as Wendy’s (WEN.O), Arby’s and Landry’s restaurants.

Shares in Chipotle Mexican Grill ended marginally lower at $480.15 on Friday following the announcement.

 

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Homeland Security Issues Warning on Cyberattack Campaign

Posted on May 10, 2017 | Leave a comment

The Department of Homeland Security is warning IT services providers, healthcare organizations and three other business sectors about a sophisticated cyberattack campaign that involves using stolen administrative credentials and implanting malware, including PLUGX/SOGU and RedLeaves, on critical systems.

The alert notes that DHS’ National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center “has become aware of an emerging sophisticated campaign, occurring since at least May 2016, that uses multiple malware implants. Initial victims have been identified in several sectors, including information technology, energy, healthcare and public health, communications and critical manufacturing.”

Mac McMillan, president of the security consulting firm CynergisTek, says the threat is serious. “These attacks could lead to full network compromise, long-term undetected attacks, and compromise/exploitation of systems and data, essentially putting both operations and patient safety at risk,” he says.

The April 27 alert, which was updated on May 2, says preliminary analysis has found that threat actors appear to be leveraging stolen administrative credentials – local and domain – and certificates.

“Some of the campaign victims have been IT service providers, where credential compromises could potentially be leveraged to access customer environments,” the alert notes. “Depending on the defensive mitigations in place, the threat actor could possibly gain full access to networks and data in a way that appears legitimate to existing monitoring tools.”

Under Investigation

DHS says the activity is still under investigation. “The threat actors in this campaign have been observed employing a variety of tactics, techniques, and procedures,” according to the alert. “The actors use malware implants to acquire legitimate credentials then leverage those credentials to pivot throughout the local environment. NCCIC is aware of several compromises involving the exploitation of system administrators’ credentials to access trusted domains as well as the malicious use of certificates.”

Additionally, the adversary makes heavy use of PowerShell and the open source PowerSploit tool to enable assessment, reconnaissance, and lateral movement, the alert notes.

“Command and control primarily occurs using RC4 cipher communications over port 443 to domains that change IP addresses. Many of these domains spoof legitimate sites and content, with a particular focus on spoofing Windows update sites. Most of the known domains leverage dynamic DNS services, and this pattern adds to the complexity of tracking this activity.”

In addition to leveraging user impersonation via compromised credentials the attackers are using malware implants left behind on key relay and staging machines, the alert states. “In some instances, the malware has only been found within memory with no on-disk evidence available for examination. To date, the actors have deployed multiple malware families and variants, some of which are currently not detected by anti-virus signatures. The observed malware includes PLUGX/SOGU and RedLeaves.”

The attackers have modified the malware to “improve effectiveness and avoid detection by existing signatures,” the alert notes.

DHS warns successful network intrusion involving these attacks could result in temporary or permanent loss of sensitive or proprietary information, disruption to regular operations, financial losses incurred to restore systems and files and potential harm to an organization’s reputation.

Earlier Warning

The DHS alert follows a blog posted in early April by researchers at BAE Systems and PwC about the firms’ investigation into a campaign of intrusions against several major managed services providers.

“These attacks can be attributed to the actor known as APT10 – a.k.a. CVNX, Stone Panda, MenuPass, and POTASSIUM,” the blog states. “Their activity seems to have increased in mid-2016, and has focused on compromise of MSPs as a stepping stone into victim organizations.”

APT10 is a Chinese cyber espionage group that the security firm FireEye has been tracking since 2009.

The blog from BAE and PwC notes that the current campaign linked to APT10 can be split into two sets of activity: Attacks targeting MSPs, engineering and other sectors with common as well as custom malware, and attacks targeting Japanese organizations with the ‘ChChes’ malware.

The attacks linked to APT10 targeting managed services providers use a custom dropper for their various implants, the researchers note. “This dropper makes use of dynamic-link library side-loading to execute the main payload.” The researchers write their analysis shows the attackers have used several payloads, including:

  • PlugX, a well-known espionage tool in use by several threat actors;
  • RedLeaves, a newly developed, fully-featured backdoor, first used by APT10 in recent months.

“Whilst these attackers have skill, persistence, some new tools and infrastructure – there is nothing about the techniques themselves that should make this hard to detect or mitigate. The lessons learned from these incidents should be used as an opportunity for security improvements for both MSPs and their customers,” the blog says.

DHS in its alert notes: “All organizations that provide IT services as a commodity for other organizations should evaluate their infrastructure to determine if related activity has taken place. Active monitoring of network traffic for the indicators of compromise … as well as behavior analysis for similar activity, should be conducted to identify command and control traffic.”

In addition, DHS notes, “Frequency analysis should be conducted at the lowest level possible to determine any unusual fluctuation in bandwidth indicative of a potential data exfiltration. Both management and client systems should be evaluated for host indicators provided.”

Precautionary Moves

McMillan suggests that healthcare entities take steps to prevent falling victim to these attacks.

“Healthcare organizations should ensure that their service provider is actually looking for the indicators,” he says. “Within their own network they should be assessing for the presence of the detailed indicators in the NCCIC report. If an indicator of compromise is detected they should take appropriate action to remediate and reach out to NCCIC for assistance and further details. Secondarily, they should be reviewing the service provider contracts to ensure the vendor is monitoring actively.”

About the Author:

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee

Executive Editor, HealthcareInfoSecurity

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee is executive editor of Information Security Media Group’s HealthcareInfoSecurity.com media site. She has about 30 years of IT journalism experience, with a focus on healthcare information technology issues for more than 15 years. Before joining ISMG in 2012, she was a reporter at InformationWeek magazine and news site, and played a lead role in the launch of InformationWeek’s healthcare IT media site.

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Google Docs users hit with sophisticated phishing attack in their inboxes

Posted on May 4, 2017 | Leave a comment

Google said it was investigating an email scam winding its way through inboxes across the country and had disabled the accounts responsible for the spam.

The scheme emerged Wednesday afternoon, when spammers dispatched malicious email, appearing to come from people the recipients knew, beckoning them to click on what appeared to be a shared Google document.

Recipients who clicked on the links were prompted to give the sender access to their Google contact lists and Google Drive. In the process, victims allowed spammers to raid their contact lists and send even more email.

“We are investigating a phishing email that appears as Google Docs,” Google said statement posted on Twitter. “We encourage you to not click through and report as phishing within Gmail.”

It is not clear who created the spam email or how many people it has affected.

In a second statement, on Wednesday evening, Google said that it had disabled the accounts responsible for the spam, updated its systems to block it and was working on ways to prevent such an attack from recurring.

If you receive suspicious email, here are some tips:

1. Do not click, even when the email is from your mother.

Even when you receive links from trusted contacts, be careful what you click. Spammers, cybercriminals and, increasingly, nation-state spies are resorting to basic email attacks, known as spear phishing, which bait victims into clicking on links that download malicious software, or lure them into turning over their user names and passwords.

A quarter of phishing attacks studied last year by Verizon were found to be nation-state spies trying to gain entry into their target’s inboxes, up from the 9 percent of attacks reported in 2016.

In this case, the malicious emails all appeared to come from a contact, but were actually from the address “hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh@mailinator.com” with recipients BCCed.

2. Turn on multifactor authentication.

Google and most other email, social media and banking services offer customers the ability to turn on multifactor authentication. Use it. When you log in from an unrecognized computer, the service will prompt you to enter a one-time code texted to your phone. It is the most basic way to prevent hackers from breaking into your accounts with a stolen password.

3. Shut it down.

If you accidentally clicked on the Google phishing attack and gave spammers third-party access to your Google account, you can revoke their access by following these steps:
https://myaccount.google.com/permissions

Revoke access to “Google Docs” (the app will have access to contacts and drive).

4. Change your passwords … again.

If you’ve been phished, change your passwords to something you have never used before. Ideally, your passwords should be long and should not be words that could be found in a dictionary. The first things hackers do when breaking into a site is use computer programs that will try every word in the dictionary. Your email account is a ripe target for hackers because your inbox is the key to resetting the passwords of, and potentially breaking into, dozens of other accounts.

Make your password long and distinctive at least 12 characters. Security specialists advise creating acronyms based on song lyrics, movie quotations or sayings. For example, “StarWars” becomes !!$t@r|W@rz!!

5. Report it.

Report any phishing attacks to Google by clicking the downward arrow at the top right of your inbox and selecting “Report Phishing.” Companies count on those reports to investigate such scams and stop them.

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Sound the alarm: Hacker sets off emergency warning sirens in Dallas

Posted on April 12, 2017 | Leave a comment

Emergency sirens around Dallas, Texas, activated late on Friday night, waking residents across the city for over an hour, and prompting a flood of calls to the city’s 911 center. Officials from the city’s emergency management office have confirmed that there was no emergency, and that the system was breached by hackers.

City officials said a hacker accessed the system and repeatedly sounded the sirens. The sirens were first heard at about 11:45 p.m. and sounded on and off intermittently for about an hour. Rocky Vaz, the director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management, said all 156 of the city sirens were hacked and activated.  Eventually, city officials were forced to essentially unplug the entire system to deactivate it completely. After investigating, they were able to locate “one area where we think [the attackers] were able to get into our system and activate all the sirens.”

Dallas City Fire and Rescue had to visit each individual siren site to manually turn them off. All sirens were completely shut off by 1:20 a.m. City officials said that Dallas 911 received 800 calls during a fifteen minute period around midnight.

Mayor Mike Rawlings said the hack was an attack on Dallas’ emergency notification system, and that the city will “find and prosecute whomever is responsible.”

“This is yet another serious example of the need for us to upgrade and better safeguard our city’s technology infrastructure,” Rawlings said. “It’s a costly proposition, which is why every dollar of taxpayer money must be spent with critical needs such as this in mind. Making the necessary improvements is imperative for the safety of our citizens.”

Dallas officials said they are working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to create a wireless alert system that would circulate messages to every cell phone in the area, in the event of a real emergency.

This attack will open the eyes of City officials..

 

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People are talking about hackers ‘ransoming’ Apple — here’s what’s actually going on

Posted on March 24, 2017 | Leave a comment

If you don’t want to be hacked, don’t use the same password across different services.

And if you’re an Apple user, it’s a good idea to check your Apple ID and iCloud account today to make sure it’s using a unique and long password.

On Wednesday, a hacking group calling itself the Turkish Crime Family told Business Insider that it had about 600 million iCloud passwords it would use to reset users’ accounts on April 7.

Apple told Business Insider in a statement that if the hackers had passwords, they did not come from a breach of Apple systems:

“There have not been any breaches in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud and Apple ID. The alleged list of email addresses and passwords appears to have been obtained from previously compromised third-party services.

“We’re actively monitoring to prevent unauthorized access to user accounts and are working with law enforcement to identify the criminals involved. To protect against these type of attacks, we always recommend that users always use strong passwords, not use those same passwords across sites and turn on two-factor authentication.”

It is still possible that the group has some users’ passwords. Information from several large breaches, including those of Yahoo and LinkedIn, have spread across the internet in recent years. If an Apple user has the same password and email for, say, LinkedIn and iCloud, there’s a good chance that iCloud password is already publicly available.

Here’s what you can do to protect yourself:

Turn on two-factor authentication. That means when you log in to your iCloud account you’ll be asked to send a six-digit code to your phone. It’s annoying, but it’s the best way to ensure that your account remains your own.

Don’t use the same password for multiple services. If one of your accounts is hacked or breached, hackers can essentially access all your accounts that used the same password. Make sure to use a different password for your Apple ID and your email account — here’s how to change your Apple ID password and how to check if your password may already be public.

Make sure your password is long, random, and unique. Don’t use your name, birthday, or other common words.

  • Why this matters now

    Over the past few days, the Turkish Crime Family has contacted media outlets saying it has 200 million, 250 million, 519 million, or as many as 750 million Apple ID account credentials culled from breaches of other services.

    The hacking group also said it had been in contact with Apple and was demanding $75,000 in cryptocurrency like bitcoin or $100,000 in Apple gift cards.

    If Apple did nothing, it would “face really serious server issues and customer complaints” in an attack on April 7, a member of the hacking group told Business Insider in an email. They said they were carrying out the attack in support of the Yahoo hacking suspect.

    A report from Motherboard said the group had shown the outlet an email from one of the hackers to an Apple product-security specialist that discussed the ransom demands. That email is fake, a person with knowledge of Apple’s security operations told Business Insider.

    Apple is in contact with law enforcement about the ransom demand, the person said. Apple is unsure if the group’s claims are true, but people at the company say they doubt they are.

    There are other reasons to doubt the hackers’ claims, such as their thirst for publicity and their fluid story.

    But even if the hackers are telling the truth, Apple users can protect themselves by making sure their Apple ID password is unique and hasn’t been revealed in a previous breach.

    “A breach means nothing in 2017 when you can just pull the exact same user information in smaller scales through companies that aren’t as secure,” the group purportedly said in a post on Pastebin in response to Apple’s statement.

    Best thing to do to insure this does not happen to you is “Change Your Passwords”

 

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Over 20 million Gmail and 5 million Yahoo decrypted accounts now reportedly for sale on the Dark Web

Posted on March 21, 2017 | Leave a comment

Over 20 million Gmail and 5 million Yahoo decrypted accounts now allegedly for sale on the Dark Web

A dark web vendor is reportedly selling millions of decrypted Gmail and Yahoo accounts in an unspecified underground marketplace. Over 20 million Gmail accounts and five million Yahoo accounts from previous massive data breaches are now reportedly up for sale.

A dark web vendor going by the name “SunTzu583”, who has previously also allegedly listed over one million decrypted Gmail and Yahoo accounts on the dark web, now appears to have ramped up his efforts.

According to a HackRead report, in separate listings, the cybercriminal is allegedly offering 4,928,888 and 21,800,969 Gmail accounts, of which the latter has been listed for $450 (0.4673 Bitcoins). While the first listing includes email addresses and clear text passwords, 75% of the second listing allegedly contains decrypted passwords and 25% hashed passwords.

The Gmail data reportedly corresponds to those stolen in previous breaches, including the Nulled.cr hack and the Dropbox data breach.

The cybercriminal is also allegedly selling 5,741,802 Yahoo accounts for $250 (0.2532 Bitcoins). Most of the accounts listed were allegedly disabled and appear to have been stolen from MySpace, Adobe and LinkedIn data breaches.

For both the Gmail and Yahoo accounts, the dark web vendor claims that not all the email and password combinations work directly, warning potential buyers to not expect them to match in all cases.

The data has reportedly been matched against those on popular data breach notification platforms such as Have I Been Pwned and Hacked-DB. However, the data has not been independently verified by IBTimes UK.

How to keep your data safe

Cybercrime ramped up to alarming levels last year, which also saw a slew of massive cyberattacks. Those concerned about keeping their accounts and data safe should incorporate safe security practices. In the event of a breach, or even a potential one, it is recommended that passwords be changed immediately. It’s also essential that you not reuse passwords, instead use unique and strong passwords for each of your accounts.

Remember to stay safe out in the cyber world !!!

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WikiLeaks publishes ‘biggest ever leak of secret CIA documents’

Posted on March 9, 2017 | Leave a comment

The 8,761 documents published by WikiLeaks focus mainly on techniques for hacking and surveillance

The US intelligence agencies are facing fresh embarrassment after WikiLeaks published what it described as the biggest ever leak of confidential documents from the CIA detailing the tools it uses to break into phones, communication apps and other electronic devices.

The thousands of leaked documents focus mainly on techniques for hacking and reveal how the CIA cooperated with British intelligence to engineer a way to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices.

The leak, named “Vault 7” by WikiLeaks, will once again raise questions about the inability of US spy agencies to protect secret documents in the digital age. It follows disclosures about Afghanistan and Iraq by army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010 and about the National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ by Edward Snowden in 2013.

The new documents appear to be from the CIA’s 200-strong Center for Cyber Intelligence and show in detail how the agency’s digital specialists engage in hacking. Monday’s leak of about 9,000 secret files, which WikiLeaks said was only the first tranche of documents it had obtained, were all relatively recent, running from 2013 to 2016.

The revelations in the documents include:
1. CIA hackers targeted smartphones and computers.
2. The Center for Cyber Intelligence, based at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, has a second covert base in the US consulate in Frankfurt which covers Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
3. A program called Weeping Angel describes how to attack a Samsung F8000 TV set so that it appears to be off but can still be used for monitoring.

The CIA declined to comment on the leak beyond the agency’s now-stock refusal to verify the content. “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents,” wrote CIA spokesperson Heather Fritz Horniak. But it is understood the documents are genuine and a hunt is under way for the leakers or hackers responsible for the leak.

WikiLeaks, in a statement, was vague about its source. “The archive appears to have been circulated among former US government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive,” the organization said.

The leak feeds into the present feverish controversy in Washington over alleged links between Donald Trump’s team and Russia. US officials have claimed WikiLeaks acts as a conduit for Russian intelligence and Trump sided with the website during the White House election campaign, praising the organization for publishing leaked Hillary Clinton emails.

Asked about the claims regarding vulnerabilities in consumer products, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said: “I’m not going to comment on that. Obviously that’s something that’s not been fully evaluated.”

Asked about Trump’s praise for WikiLeaks during last year’s election, when it published emails hacked from Clinton’s campaign chairman, Spicer told the Guardian: “The president said there’s a difference between Gmail accounts and classified information. The president made that distinction a couple of weeks ago.”

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, said the disclosures were “exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective”. WikiLeaks has been criticized in the past for dumping documents on the internet unredacted and this time the names of officials and other information have been blacked out.

WikiLeaks shared the information in advance with Der Spiegel in Germany and La Repubblica in Italy.

Edward Snowden, who is in exile in Russia, said in a series of tweets the documents seemed genuine and that only an insider could know this kind of detail. He tweeted:
The document dealing with Samsung televisions carries the CIA logo and is described as secret. It adds “USA/UK”. It says: “Accomplishments during joint workshop with MI5/BTSS (British Security Service) (week of June 16, 2014).”

It details how to fake it so that the television appears to be off but in reality can be used to monitor targets. It describes the television as being in “Fake Off” mode. Referring to UK involvement, it says: “Received sanitized source code from UK with comms and encryption removed.”

WikiLeaks, in a press release heralding the leak, said: “The attack against Samsung smart TVs was developed in cooperation with the United Kingdom’s MI5/BTSS. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a ‘Fake Off’ mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In ‘Fake Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the internet to a covert CIA server.”

The role of MI5, the domestic intelligence service, is mainly to track terrorists and foreign intelligence agencies and monitoring along the lines revealed in the CIA documents would require a warrant.

The Snowden revelations created tension between the intelligence agencies and the major IT companies upset that the extent of their cooperation with the NSA had been exposed. But the companies were primarily angered over the revelation the agencies were privately working on ways to hack into their products. The CIA revelations risk renewing the friction with the private sector.

The initial reaction of members of the intelligence community was to question whether the latest revelations were in the public interest.

A source familiar with the CIA’s information security capabilities took issue with WikiLeaks’s comment that the leaker wanted “to initiate a public debate about cyberweapons”. But the source said this was akin to claiming to be worried about nuclear proliferation and then offering up the launch codes for just one country’s nuclear weapons at the moment when a war seemed most likely to begin.

Monday’s leaks also reveal that CIA hackers operating out of the Frankfurt consulate are given diplomatic (“black”) passports and US State Department cover. The documents include instructions for incoming CIA hackers that make Germany’s counter-intelligence efforts appear inconsequential.

The document reads:

“Breeze through German customs because you have your cover-for-action story down pat, and all they did was stamp your passport.

Your cover story (for this trip):

Q: Why are you here?

A: Supporting technical consultations at the consulate.”

The leaks also reveal a number of the CIA’s electronic attack methods are designed for physical proximity. These attack methods are able to penetrate high-security networks that are disconnected from the internet, such as police record databases. In these cases, a CIA officer, agent or allied intelligence officer acting under instructions, physically infiltrates the targeted workplace. The attacker is provided with a USB stick containing malware developed for the CIA for this purpose, which is inserted into the targeted computer. The attacker then infects and extracts data.

A CIA attack system called Fine Dining provides 24 decoy applications for CIA spies to use. To witnesses, the spy appears to be running a program showing videos, presenting slides, playing a computer game, or even running a fake virus scanner. But while the decoy application is on the screen, the system is automatically infected and ransacked.

The documents also provide travel advice for hackers heading to Frankfurt: “Flying Lufthansa: Booze is free so enjoy (within reason).”

The rights group Privacy International, in a statement, said it had long warned about government hacking powers. “Insufficient security protections in the growing amount of devices connected to the internet or so-called ‘smart’ devices, such as Samsung smart TVs, only compound the problem, giving governments easier access to our private lives,” the group said.

 

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Yahoo’s hack warning comes from a third breach, Yahoo says

Posted on February 17, 2017 | Leave a comment

How many times does this have to happen??
Three strikes and your out

Yahoo’s newly issued warning to users about malicious hacks is related to a third data breach that the company disclosed in December 2016.

A warning sent to some Yahoo users Wednesday read: “Based on the ongoing investigation, we believe a forged cookie may have been used in 2015 or 2016 to access your account.”

This breach was quietly revealed in a December 2016 statement from Yahoo that provided information on a separate hack that occurred in August 2013 involving more than 1 billion accounts. Some of 2015 and 2016 incidents have been tied to a “state-sponsored actor” that was involved in another 2014 breach that affected up to 500 million accounts.

“Forged cookies” are digital keys that allow access to information without re-entering passwords. The leaked data included email addresses, birth dates and answers to security questions. Yahoo declined to say how many people were affected.

“As we have previously disclosed, our outside forensic experts have been investigating the creation of forged cookies that could have enabled an intruder to access our users’ accounts without a password,” a Yahoo spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “The investigation has identified user accounts for which we believe forged cookies were taken or used. Yahoo is in the process of notifying all potentially affected account holders.”

A source familiar with the matter said the investigations for these breaches are nearing an end.

The earlier, catastrophic breaches that impacted over 1.5 billion accounts raised questions about Yahoo’s security, and called into question the company’s deal to sell itself to Verizon Communications.

Both SunTrust and CFRA retained their hold opinion on Yahoo shares, mostly tied to the fact that Verizon will likely still purchase the internet company and has renegotiated the purchase price. Bloomberg reported that the telecommunications company was able to reduce the initial $4.8 billion price by $250 million due to the data breaches.

I really think it time to delete that Yahoo account and put the matter to bed.

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