Online dating giant eHarmony has begun urging users to change their passwords, after being alerted by KrebsOnSecurity.com to a potential security breach of customer information. Once again, the individual responsible for all the ruckus is an Argentinian hacker who recently claimed responsibility for a similar breach at competing e-dating site PlentyOfFish.com.
A company that is helping the federal government track down cyberactivists who have been attacking business that refused to support Wikileaks has itself been hacked by the very same activists it is investigating.
At the center of the storm is a leaderless and anarchic Internet group called Anonymous, which more recently has been coordinating attacks against Egyptian government Web sites. Late last month, authorities in the U.K. and the U.S. moved against at least 45 suspected Anonymous activists. Then, on Saturday, the Financial Times ran a story quoting Aaron Barr, the head of security services firm HBGary Federal, saying he had uncovered the identities of Anonymous’ leaders using social networking sites and planned to release his findings at a security conference in San Francisco next week.
In October 2010, I discovered that the authors of the SpyEye and ZeuS banking Trojans — once competitors in the market for botnet creation and management kits — were killing further development of ZeuS and planning to fuse the two malware families into one supertrojan. Initially, I heard some skepticism from folks in the security community about this. But three months later, security experts are now starting to catch glimpses of this new hybrid Trojan in the wild, as the author(s) begins shipping a series of beta releases that include updated features on a nearly-daily basis.
Egyptian citizens calling for besieged President Hosni Mubarak to step down may have been cut off from using the Web, but spammers have been busy cutting the government off from its own Internet address space: Earlier this month, junk e-mail artists hijacked a swath of Internet addresses assigned to Mubarak’s wife.
Hackers have breached the database of online dating site PlentyOfFish.com, exposing personal and password information on nearly 30 million users, including its founder and administrators. In response, the company has implied that the editor of KrebsOnSecurity.com was involved in an elaborate extortion plot.
Getting hacked is no fun. Learning that you’ve been hacked when a reporter calls is probably even less fun. But for better or worse, I have notified dozens of companies about various breaches over the years, and I’ve learned a few things about how victims respond. Usually, when the company in question responds by implicating you in an alleged extortion scheme, two things become clear:
1) You’re probably not going to get any real answers to your direct questions about the incident, and;
2) The company almost certainly did have a serious breach.
Media attention to crimes involving ATM skimmers may make consumers more likely to identify compromised cash machines, which involve cleverly disguised theft devices that sometimes appear off-color or out-of-place. Yet, many of today’s skimmer scams can swipe your card details and personal identification number while leaving the ATM itself completely untouched, making them far more difficult to spot.
The most common of these off-ATM skimmers can be found near cash machines that are located in the antechamber of a bank or building lobby, where access is controlled by a key card lock that is activated when the customer swipes his or her ATM card. In these scams, the thieves remove the card swipe device attached to the outside door, add a skimmer, and then reattach the device to the door. The attackers then place a hidden camera just above or beside the ATM, so that the camera is angled to record unsuspecting customers entering their PINs.
As many readers no doubt know, the Egyptian government on Thursday severed the nation’s ties with the rest of the Internet, in an apparent effort to disrupt political protests calling for an end to the 30-year rule of Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.
I’ve been tweeting new developments as they arise, but I wanted to point to a few of the more dramatic graphs that different sources have drawn up to show the precipitous decline in Internet traffic and connectivity from Egypt as leaders there sought to isolate phone and computer networks from the rest of the world.
Peter Bennett first suspected his own Web site might have been turned into a spam-spewing zombie on Nov. 11, the night he discovered that a tiny program secretly uploaded to his site was forcing it to belch ads for rogue Internet pharmacies.
Bennett’s site had been silently “infected” via an unknown (at the time) vulnerability in a popular e-commerce software package. While most site owners probably would have just cleaned up the mess and moved on, Bennett — a longtime anti-spam vigilante — took the attack as a personal challenge.
A lawsuit headed to court this week over the 2009 cyber theft of more than a half-million dollars from a small metals shop in Michigan could help draw brighter lines on how far banks need to go to protect their business customers from account takeovers and fraud.
Recently, I found a guy on an exclusive online scammer forum who has hawking variety of paraphernalia used in ATM skimmers, devices designed to be stuck on the outside of cash machines and steal ATM card and PIN data from bank customers. I wasn’t sure whether I could take this person seriously, but his ratings on the forum — in which fellow members leave feedback for others based on positive or negative experiences with previous transactions — were positive enough that I figured he must be one of the relatively few guys on this particular forum who was actually selling ATM skimmers, as opposed to just scamming other scammers.
