Category Archives: Data Breaches

Stories about data breaches at retailers, corporations, governments and organizations of all sizes.

First American Financial Corp. Leaked Hundreds of Millions of Title Insurance Records

May 24, 2019
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The Web site for Fortune 500 real estate title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. [NYSE:FAF] leaked hundreds of millions of documents related to mortgage deals going back to 2003, until notified this week by KrebsOnSecurity. The digitized records — including bank account numbers and statements, mortgage and tax records, Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts, and drivers license images — were available without authentication to anyone with a Web browser.

Data: E-Retail Hacks More Lucrative Than Ever

April 30, 2019
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For many years and until quite recently, credit card data stolen from online merchants has been worth far less in the cybercrime underground than cards pilfered from hacked brick-and-mortar stores. But new data suggests that over the past year, the economics of supply-and-demand have helped to double the average price fetched by card-not-present data, meaning cybercrooks now have far more incentive than ever to target e-commerce stores.

How Not to Acknowledge a Data Breach

April 17, 2019
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I’m not a huge fan of stories about stories, or those that explore the ins and outs of reporting a breach. But occasionally it seems necessary to publish such accounts when companies respond to a breach report in such a way that it’s crystal clear that they wouldn’t know what to do with a breach if it bit them in the nose, let alone festered unmolested in some dark corner of their operations.

Experts: Breach at IT Outsourcing Giant Wipro

April 15, 2019
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Indian information technology (IT) outsourcing and consulting giant Wipro [NYSE:WIT] is investigating reports from multiple security experts that Wipro’s systems have been hacked and are being used to launch attacks against the company’s customers, multiple sources tell KrebsOnSecurity. The company has refused to respond to questions about the alleged incident.

A Month After 2 Million Customer Cards Sold Online, Buca di Beppo Parent Admits Breach

March 29, 2019
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On Feb. 21, 2019, KrebsOnSecurity contacted Italian restaurant chain Buca di Beppo after discovering strong evidence that two million credit and debit card numbers belonging to the company’s customers were being sold in the cybercrime underground. Today, Buca’s parent firm announced it had remediated a 10-month breach of its payment systems at dozens of restaurants, including some locations of its other brands such as Earl of Sandwich and Planet Hollywood.

Ad Network Sizmek Probes Account Breach

March 13, 2019
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Online advertising firm Sizmek Inc. [NASDAQ: SZMK] says it is investigating a security incident in which a hacker was reselling access to a user account with the ability to modify ads and analytics for a number of big-name advertisers.

In a recent posting to a Russian-language cybercrime forum, an individual who’s been known to sell access to hacked online accounts kicked off an auction for “the admin panel of a big American ad platform.”

“You can add new users to the ad system, edit existing ones and ad offers,” the seller wrote. The starting bid was $800.

Hackers Sell Access to Bait-and-Switch Empire

March 4, 2019
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Cybercriminals are auctioning off access to customer information stolen from an online data broker behind a dizzying array of bait-and-switch Web sites that sell access to a vast range of data on U.S. consumers, including DMV and arrest records, genealogy reports, phone number lookups and people searches. In an ironic twist, the marketing empire that owns the hacked online properties appears to be run by a Canadian man who’s been sued for fraud by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Microsoft and Oprah Winfrey, to name a few.

A Deep Dive on the Recent Widespread DNS Hijacking Attacks

February 18, 2019
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The U.S. government — along with a number of leading security companies — recently warned about a series of highly complex and widespread attacks that allowed suspected Iranian hackers to siphon huge volumes of email passwords and other sensitive data from multiple governments and private companies. But to date, the specifics of exactly how that attack went down and who was hit have remained shrouded in secrecy.

This post seeks to document the extent of those attacks, and traces the origins of this overwhelmingly successful cyber espionage campaign back to a cascading series of breaches at key Internet infrastructure providers.