Normally, if one wishes to buy stolen account credentials for paid online services like Netflix, Hulu, XBox Live or Spotify, the buyer needs to visit a cybercrime forum or drop into a dark Web marketplace that only accepts Bitcoin as payment. Increasingly, however, these accounts are showing up for sale at Payivy[dot]com, an open Web marketplace that happily accepts PayPal in exchange for a variety of stolen accounts.
Last week, Allentown, Pa. based point-of-sale (POS) maker Harbortouch disclosed that a breach involving “a small number” of its restaurant and bar customers were impacted by malicious software that allowed thieves to siphon customer card data from affected merchants. KrebsOnSecurity has recently heard from a major U.S. card issuer that says the company is radically downplaying the scope of the breach, and that the compromise appears to have impacted more than 4,200 Harbortouch customers nationwide.
Chinese government censors at the helm of the “Great Firewall of China” appear to have errantly blocked Chinese Web surfers from visiting pages that call out to connect.facebook.net, a resource used by Facebook’s “like” buttons. While the apparent screw-up was quickly fixed, the block was cached by many Chinese networks — effectively preventing millions of Chinese Web surfers from visiting a huge number of sites that are not normally censored.
When your credit card gets stolen because a merchant you did business with got hacked, it’s often quite easy for investigators to figure out which company was victimized. The process of divining the provenance of stolen healthcare records, however, is far trickier because these records typically are processed or handled by a gauntlet of third party firms, most of which have no direct relationship with the patient or customer ultimately harmed by the breach.
Sendgrid, an email service used by tens of thousands of companies — including Silicon Valley giants as well as Bitcoin exchange Coinbase — said attackers compromised a Sendgrid employee’s account, which was then used to steal the usernames, email addresses and (hashed) passwords of customer and employee accounts. The announcement comes several weeks after Sendgrid sought to assure customers that the breach was limited to a single customer account.
Not long ago, I was working on a speech and found myself trying to come up with a phrase that encapsulates the difference between organizations that really make cybersecurity a part of their culture and those that merely pay it lip service and do the bare minimum (think ’15 pieces of flair’). When the phrase “security maturity” came to mind, I thought for sure I’d conceived of an original idea and catchy phrase. It turns out this is already a thing. And a really notable thing at that.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of public speaking lately — usually about cybercrime and underground activity — and there’s one question that nearly always comes from the audience: “Why are these fraud Web sites allowed to operate, and not… Read More »
“PoSeidon,” a new strain of malicious software designed to steal credit and debit card data from hacked point-of-sale (POS) devices, has been implicated in a number of recent breaches involving companies that provide POS services primarily to restaurants, bars and hotels. The shift by the card thieves away from targeting major retailers like Target and Home Depot to attacking countless, smaller users of POS systems is giving financial institutions a run for their money as they struggle to figure out which merchants are responsible for card fraud.
China has been actively diverting unencrypted Web traffic destined for its top online search service — Baidu.com — so that some visitors from outside of the country were unwittingly enlisted in a novel and unsettling series of denial-of-service attacks aimed at sidelining sites that distribute anti-censorship tools, according to research released this week.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning that individuals sympathetic to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS) are mass-defacing Websites using known vulnerabilities in WordPress. The FBI also issued an alert advising that criminals are hosting fraudulent… Read More »
