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Mirai Botnet Authors Avoid Jail Time

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2018 16:54:40 +0000

Citing “extraordinary cooperation” with the government, a court in Alaska on Tuesday sentenced three men to probation, community service and fines for their admitted roles in authoring and using “Mirai,” a potent malware strain used in countless attacks designed to knock Web sites offline — including an enormously powerful attack in 2016 that sidelined this Web site for nearly four days.

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IndependentKrebs

GovPayNow.com Leaks 14M+ Records

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2018 21:57:39 +0000

Government Payment Service Inc. — a company used by thousands of U.S. state and local governments to accept online payments for everything from traffic citations and licensing fees to bail payments and court-ordered fines — has leaked more than 14 million customer records dating back at least six years, including names, addresses, phone numbers and the last four digits of the payer’s credit card.

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IndependentKrebs

U.S. Mobile Giants Want to be Your Online Identity

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2018 20:58:31 +0000

The four major U.S. wireless carriers today detailed a new initiative that may soon let Web sites eschew passwords and instead authenticate visitors by leveraging data elements unique to each customer’s phone and mobile subscriber account, such as location, customer reputation, and physical attributes of the device. Here’s a look at what’s coming, and the potential security and privacy trade-offs of trusting the carriers to handle online authentication on your behalf.

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IndependentKrebs

Patch Tuesday, September 2018 Edition

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2018 20:35:27 +0000

Adobe and Microsoft today each released patches to fix serious security holes in their software. Adobe pushed out a new version of its beleaguered Flash Player browser plugin. Redmond issued updates to address at least 61 distinct vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows and related programs, including several flaws that were publicly detailed prior to today and one “zero-day” bug in Windows that is already being actively exploited by attackers.

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IndependentKrebs

In a Few Days, Credit Freezes Will Be Fee-Free

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2018 02:26:06 +0000

Later this month, all of the three major consumer credit bureaus will be required to offer free credit freezes to all Americans and their dependents. Maybe you’ve been holding off freezing your credit file because your home state currently charges a fee for placing or thawing a credit freeze, or because you believe it’s just not worth the hassle. If that accurately describes your views on the matter, this post may well change your mind.

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IndependentKrebs

Leader of DDoS-for-Hire Gang Pleads Guilty to Bomb Threats

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2018 15:51:13 +0000

A 19-year-old man from the United Kingdom who headed a cybercriminal group whose motto was “Feds Can’t Touch Us” pleaded guilty this week to making bomb threats against thousands of schools. On Aug. 31, officers with the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) arrested Hertfordshire resident George Duke-Cohan, who admitted making bomb threats to thousands of schools and a United Airlines flight traveling from the U.K. to San Francisco last month.

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IndependentKrebs

Browser Extensions: Are They Worth the Risk?

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:55:08 +0000

Popular file-sharing site Mega.nz is warning users that cybercriminals hacked its browser extension for Google Chrome so that any usernames and passwords submitted through the browser were copied and forwarded to a rogue server in Ukraine. This attack serves as a fresh reminder that legitimate browser extensions can and periodically do fall into the wrong hands, and that it makes good security sense to limit your exposure to such attacks by getting rid of extensions that are no longer useful or actively maintained by developers.

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IndependentKrebs

For 2nd Time in 3 Years, Mobile Spyware Maker mSpy Leaks Millions of Sensitive Records

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2018 17:22:41 +0000

mSpy, the makers of a software-as-a-service product that claims to help more than a million paying customers spy on the mobile devices of their kids and partners, has leaked millions of sensitive records online, including passwords, call logs, text messages, contacts, notes and location data secretly collected from phones running the stealthy spyware. Less than a week ago, security researcher Nitish Shah directed KrebsOnSecurity to an open database on the Web that allowed anyone to query up-to-the-minute mSpy records for both customer transactions at mSpy’s site and for mobile phone data collected by mSpy’s software. The database required no authentication.

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