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Yahoo warns users of account breaches related to recent attacks

Credit to Author: Grant Gross| Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2017 11:01:00 -0800

Yahoo has begun warning individual users that their accounts with the service may have been compromised in a massive data breach it reported late last year.

The warning, in email messages sent from Yahoo CISO Bob Lord, tell users that a forged cookie may have been used to access their accounts in previous years.

The warning to Yahoo users come at the same time that news reports suggest that Verizon Communications, in negotiations to buy Yahoo, may be seeking a discount of $250 million because of the data breaches.

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IDG Contributor Network: The look of a Facebook imposter

Credit to Author: Sandra Henry-Stocker| Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2017 08:38:00 -0800

While I don’t usually write about hoaxes and scams, a little encounter that I had over the weekend with a con artist brought this issue into clear focus for me. So, I thought I would share some thoughts about what to watch out for when dealing with Facebook friends and how to respond if one of those “friends” turns out to be someone else entirely.

You’ve probably already heard about facebook imposters – individuals who pretend to be someone you know. After you accept them as a friend, they might ask for money, claiming to be stranded in some foreign country or complaining that their wallet was stolen while on vacation and now they need your help getting back home, or they might just try to learn more about you for some nefarious reason or another. In my case, my “friend” — after a quick “hello” — started telling me that I’d won some an award amounting $150,000 in cash and that it should be on its way to me. She suggested that I call a number that she provided to be sure that I was still on the list. She claimed that she had noticed my name on the list when she got hers. Why shouldn’t I believe that?

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Privacy groups say FBI hacking operation went too far

Credit to Author: Michael Kan| Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2017 14:48:00 -0800

Privacy advocates are claiming in court that an FBI hacking operation to take down a child pornography site was unconstitutional and violated international law.

That’s because the operation involved the FBI hacking 8,700 computers in 120 countries, based on a single warrant, they said.

“How will other countries react to the FBI hacking in their jurisdictions without prior consent?” wrote Scarlet Kim, a legal officer with U.K.-based Privacy International.

On Friday, that group, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, filed briefs in a lawsuit involving the FBI’s hacking operation against Playpen. The child pornography site was accessible through Tor, a browser designed for anonymous web surfing. But in 2014, the FBI managed to take it over.

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President Bannon Chrome Extension is a security problem, not a joke

Pretending that Steve Bannon is really the President was funny when Saturday Night Live did it on their opening bit. Then today, Business Insider wrote about a Google Chrome extension that replaces every mention of “Trump” with “Steve Bannon” on all web pages. Funny? Not from a Defensive Computing perspective.

Any extension that can change a specific word on every web page is inherently dangerous. Almost by definition, such an extension is spyware.

presidentbannon.permissions Michael Horowitz

Installing the President Bannon extension to the Chrome browser

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Hacker takes out dark web hosting service using well-known exploit

A hacker is proving that sites on the dark web, shrouded in anonymity, can easily be compromised.   

On Friday, the unnamed hacker began dumping a sizable database stolen from Freedom Hosting II onto the internet, potentially exposing its users.

The hosting service, Freedom Hosting II, was known for operating thousands of sites that were accessible through the Tor browser; the “dark web” is essentially the encrypted network comprising Tor servers and browsers. But on Friday, the service appeared to be down. Its main landing page was replaced with a message saying that it had been hacked.

Allegedly, Freedom Hosting II had been hosting child pornography sites, though its anonymous operator claimed to have a zero-tolerance policy toward such content, according to the hacker behind the breach.

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Court orders Google to produce emails stored abroad

A federal court in Pennsylvania has ordered Google to comply with search warrants and produce customer emails stored abroad, in a decision that is in sharp contrast to that of an appeals court in a similar case involving Microsoft.

Magistrate Judge Thomas J. Rueter of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled Friday that the two warrants under the Stored Communications Act (SCA) for emails required by the government in two criminal investigations constituted neither a seizure nor a search of the targets’ data in a foreign country.

Transferring data electronically from a server in a foreign country to Google’s data center in California does not amount to a seizure because “there is no meaningful interference with the account holder’s possessory interest in the user data,” and Google’s algorithm in any case regularly transfers user data from one data center to another without the customer’s knowledge, Rueter wrote.

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Google ordered by U.S. court to produce emails stored abroad

Google has been ordered by a federal court in Pennsylvania to comply with search warrants and produce customer emails stored abroad, in a decision that is in sharp contrast to that of an appeals court in a similar case involving Microsoft.

Magistrate Judge Thomas J. Rueter of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled Friday that the two warrants under the Stored Communications Act (SCA) for emails required by the government in two criminal investigations constituted neither a seizure nor a search of the targets’ data in a foreign country.

Transferring data electronically from a server in a foreign country to Google’s data center in California does not amount to a seizure because “there is no meaningful interference with the account holder’s possessory interest in the user data,” and Google’s algorithm in any case regularly transfers user data from one data center to another without the customer’s knowledge, Judge Rueter wrote.

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Cybersecurity and freedom of speech under President Trump

While President Donald Trump decided not to sign an executive order on cybersecurity (pdf), which would have required a review of the nation’s cyber vulnerabilities to be done in a mere 60 days, he told reporters, “I will hold my cabinet secretaries and agency heads accountable, totally accountable for the cybersecurity of their organization.”

8 months later, vulnerable Pentagon servers still not patched

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