Monthly Archives: May 2019

What’s Behind the Wolters Kluwer Tax Outage?

May 7, 2019

Early in the afternoon on Friday, May, 3, I asked a friend to relay a message to his security contact at CCH, the cloud-based tax division of the global information services firm Wolters Kluwer in the Netherlands. The message was that the same file directories containing new versions of CCH’s software were open and writable by any anonymous user, and that there were suspicious files in those directories indicating some user(s) abused that access.

Shortly after that report, the CCH file directory for tax software downloads was taken offline. As of this publication, several readers have reported outages affecting multiple CCH Web sites. These same readers reported being unable to access their clients’ tax data in CCH’s cloud because of the ongoing outages.

Feds Bust Up Dark Web Hub Wall Street Market

May 3, 2019

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Federal investigators in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands announced today the arrest and charging of three German nationals and a Brazilian man as the alleged masterminds behind the Wall Street Market (WSM), one of the world’s largest dark web bazaars that allowed vendors to sell illegal drugs, counterfeit goods and malware. Now, at least one former WSM administrator is reportedly trying to extort money from WSM vendors and buyers (supposedly including Yours Truly) — in exchange for not publishing details of the transactions.

Credit Union Sues Fintech Giant Fiserv Over Security Claims

May 3, 2019

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A Pennsylvania credit union is suing financial industry technology giant Fiserv, alleging that “baffling” security vulnerabilities in the company’s software are “wreaking havoc” on its customers. The credit union said the investigation that fueled the lawsuit was prompted by a 2018 KrebsOnSecurity report about a glaring security weakness a Fiserv platform that exposed personal and financial details of customers across hundreds of bank Web sites.