Finastra, a company that provides a range of technology solutions to banks worldwide, said it was shutting down key systems in response to a security breach discovered Friday morning. The company’s public statement and notice to customers does not mention the cause of the outage, but their response so far is straight out of the playbook for dealing with ransomware attacks.
Anyone who’s seen the 1984 hit movie Ghostbusters likely recalls the pivotal scene where a government bureaucrat orders the shutdown of the ghost containment unit, effectively unleashing a pent-up phantom menace on New York City. Now, something similar is in danger of happening in cyberspace: Shadowserver.org, an all-volunteer nonprofit organization that works to help Internet service providers (ISPs) identify and quarantine malware infections and botnets, has lost its longtime primary source of funding.
Cybercriminals constantly latch on to news items that captivate the public’s attention, but usually they do so by sensationalizing the topic or spreading misinformation about it. Recently, however, cybercrooks have started disseminating real-time, accurate information about global infection rates tied to the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic in a bid to infect computers with malicious software.
Earlier today, KrebsOnSecurity alerted the 10th largest food distributor in the United States that one of its Web sites had been hacked and retrofitted with code that steals credit card and login data. While such Web site card skimming attacks are not new, this intrusion leveraged a sneaky new domain that hides quite easily in a hacked site’s source code: “http[.]ps” (the actual malicious domain does not include the brackets, which are there to keep readers from being able to click on it).
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today proposed fines of more than $200 million against the nation’s four largest wireless carriers for selling access to their customers’ location information without taking adequate precautions to prevent unauthorized access to that data. While the fines would be among the largest the FCC has ever levied, critics say the penalties don’t go far enough to deter wireless carriers from continuing to sell customer location data.
Networking hardware vendor Zyxel today released an update to fix a critical flaw in many of its network attached storage (NAS) devices that can be used to remotely commandeer them. The patch comes 12 days after KrebsOnSecurity alerted the company that precise instructions for exploiting the vulnerability were being sold for $20,000 in the cybercrime underground.
Based in Taiwan, Zyxel Communications Corp. (a.k.a “ZyXEL”) is a maker of networking devices, including Wi-Fi routers, NAS products and hardware firewalls. The company has roughly 1,500 employees and boasts some 100 million devices deployed worldwide. While in many respects the class of vulnerability addressed in this story is depressingly common among Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the flaw is notable because it has attracted the interest of groups specializing in deploying ransomware at scale.
Crooks are constantly dreaming up new ways to use and conceal stolen credit card data. According to the U.S. Secret Service, the latest scheme involves stolen card information embedded in barcodes affixed to phony money network rewards cards. The scammers then pay for merchandise by instructing a cashier to scan the barcode and enter the expiration date and card security code.
A new email-based extortion scheme apparently is making the rounds, targeting Web site owners serving banner ads through Google’s AdSense program. In this scam, the fraudsters demand bitcoin in exchange for a promise not to flood the publisher’s ads with so much bot and junk traffic that Google’s automated anti-fraud systems suspend the user’s AdSense account for suspicious traffic.
As an early domain name investor, Mike O’Connor had by 1994 snatched up several choice online destinations, including bar.com, cafes.com, grill.com, place.com, pub.com and television.com. Some he sold over the years, but for the past 26 years O’Connor refused to auction perhaps the most sensitive domain in his stable — corp.com. It is sensitive because years of testing shows whoever wields it would have access to an unending stream of passwords, email and other proprietary data belonging to hundreds of thousands of systems at major companies around the globe.
In late December 2019, fuel and convenience store chain Wawa Inc. said a nine-month-long breach of its payment card processing systems may have led to the theft of card data from customers who visited any of its 850 locations nationwide. Now, fraud experts say the first batch of card data stolen from Wawa customers is being sold at one of the underground’s most popular crime shops, which claims to have 30 million records to peddle from a new nationwide breach.
