Thales’ 2024 Data Threat Report reveals key insights for Australian critical infrastructure under the SOCI Act 2024. Our exclusive interview with Erick Reyes reveals the security impacts.
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One of several Android security enhancements, Google’s theft detection feature is rolling out now to a limited number of users.
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New details are emerging about a breach at National Public Data (NPD), a consumer data broker that recently spilled hundreds of millions of Americans’ Social Security Numbers, addresses, and phone numbers online. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that another NPD data broker which shares access to the same consumer records inadvertently published the passwords to its back-end database in a file that was freely available from its homepage until today.
In April, a cybercriminal named USDoD began selling data stolen from NPD. In July, someone leaked what was taken, including the names, addresses, phone numbers and in some cases email addresses for more than 272 million people (including many who are now deceased).
NPD acknowledged the intrusion on Aug. 12, saying it dates back to a security incident in December 2023. In an interview last week, USDoD blamed the July data leak on another malicious hacker who also had access to the company’s database, which they claimed has been floating around the underground since December 2023.
Following last week’s story on the breadth of the NPD breach, a reader alerted KrebsOnSecurity that a sister NPD property — the background search service recordscheck.net — was hosting an archive that included the usernames and password for the site’s administrator.
A review of that archive, which was available from the Records Check website until just before publication this morning (August 19), shows it includes the source code and plain text usernames and passwords for different components of recordscheck.net, which is visually similar to nationalpublicdata.com and features identical login pages.
The exposed archive, which was named “members.zip,” indicates RecordsCheck users were all initially assigned the same six-character password and instructed to change it, but many did not.
According to the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence, the passwords included in the source code archive are identical to credentials exposed in previous data breaches that involved email accounts belonging to NPD’s founder, an actor and retired sheriff’s deputy from Florida named Salvatore “Sal” Verini.
Reached via email, Mr. Verini said the exposed archive (a .zip file) containing recordscheck.net credentials has been removed from the company’s website, and that the site is slated to cease operations “in the next week or so.”
“Regarding the zip, it has been removed but was an old version of the site with non-working code and passwords,” Verini told KrebsOnSecurity. “Regarding your question, it is an active investigation, in which we cannot comment on at this point. But once we can, we will [be] with you, as we follow your blog. Very informative.”
The leaked recordscheck.net source code indicates the website was created by a web development firm based in Lahore, Pakistan called creationnext.com, which did not return messages seeking comment. CreationNext.com’s homepage features a positive testimonial from Sal Verini.
A testimonial from Sal Verini on the homepage of CreationNext, the Lahore, Pakistan-based web development firm that apparently designed NPD and RecordsCheck.
There are now several websites that have been stood up to help people learn if their SSN and other data was exposed in this breach. One is npdbreach.com, a lookup page erected by Atlas Data Privacy Corp. Another lookup service is available at npd.pentester.com. Both sites show NPD had old and largely inaccurate data on Yours Truly.
The best advice for those concerned about this breach is to freeze one’s credit file at each of the major consumer reporting bureaus. Having a freeze on your files makes it much harder for identity thieves to create new accounts in your name, and it limits who can view your credit information.
A freeze is a good idea because all of the information that ID thieves need to assume your identity is now broadly available from multiple sources, thanks to the multiplicity of data breaches we’ve seen involving SSN data and other key static data points about people.
Screenshots of a Telegram-based ID theft service that was selling background reports using hacked law enforcement accounts at USInfoSearch.
There are numerous cybercriminal services that offer detailed background checks on consumers, including full SSNs. These services are powered by compromised accounts at data brokers that cater to private investigators and law enforcement officials, and some are now fully automated via Telegram instant message bots.
In November 2023, KrebsOnSecurity wrote about one such service, which was being powered by hacked accounts at the U.S. consumer data broker USInfoSearch.com. This is notable because the leaked source code indicates Records Check pulled background reports on people by querying NPD’s database and records at USInfoSearch. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from USInfoSearch and will update this story if they respond.
The point is, if you’re an American who hasn’t frozen their credit files and you haven’t yet experienced some form of new account fraud, the ID thieves probably just haven’t gotten around to you yet.
All Americans are also entitled to obtain a free copy of their credit report weekly from each of the three major credit bureaus. It used to be that consumers were allowed one free report from each of the bureaus annually, but in October 2023 the Federal Trade Commission announced the bureaus had permanently extended a program that lets you check your credit report once a week for free.
If you haven’t done this in a while, now would be an excellent time to order your files. To place a freeze, you’ll need to create an account at each of the three major reporting bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Once you’ve established an account, you should be able to then view and freeze your credit file. If you spot errors, such as random addresses and phone numbers you don’t recognize, do not ignore them. Dispute any inaccuracies you may find.
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The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-38193 and marked as ‘actively exploited’ by Microsoft, allows SYSTEM privileges on the latest Windows operating systems.
The post Windows Zero-Day Attack Linked to North Korea’s Lazarus APT appeared first on SecurityWeek.
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In July 2024, with the latest version of its Firefox browser, Mozilla introduced a technology called Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA) — designed to track how effective online advertising is. The feature is enabled by default in Firefox 128.
This has already caught the eye of online privacy advocates, and led to headlines like “Now Mozilla too is selling user data”. The clamor got so loud that Firefox CTO, Bobby Holley, had to take to Reddit to explain to users what Mozilla actually did and why.
Now’s the time to take a closer look at what PPA is, why it’s needed in the first place, and why it’s appeared now.
First, a bit of backstory. As you may recall, way back in 2019 the developers of the world’s most popular browser — Google Chrome — began hatching plans to completely disable support for third-party cookies.
These tiny files have been tracking user actions online for 30 years now. The technology is both the backbone of the online advertising industry, and the chief means of violating users’ privacy.
Some time ago, as a replacement, Google unveiled an in-house development called Ad Topics. With this technology, tracking is based on users’ Chrome browser history, and interaction history with Android apps. The rollout of Ad Topics was expected to be followed by the phasing out of support for third-party cookies in Chrome in H2 2024.
Another major digital advertising player to develop its own user-tracking technology is Meta, which likewise relies on third-party cookies. Called Link History, it makes sure that all external links in the Facebook mobile apps now get opened in its built-in browser — where the company can still snoop on your actions.
The bottom line is that ending support for third-party cookies hands even more control over to Google and Meta — owner of the world’s most popular browser and mobile OS, and of the world’s most popular social network, respectively — while smaller players will become even more dependent on them.
At the same time, user data continues to be collected on an industrial scale, and primarily by the usual suspects when it comes to claims of privacy violation: yes, Google and Facebook.
The question arises: is it not possible to develop some mechanism to allow advertisers to track the effectiveness of advertising without mass collection of user data? The answer comes in the shape of Privacy-Preserving Attribution.
To better understand the history of this technology, we have to go back a bit in time — to 2017, when cryptographers Henry Corrigan-Gibbs and Dan Boneh of Stanford University presented a research paper. In it, they described a privacy-oriented system for collecting aggregated statistics, which they called Prio.
To greatly simplify matters, Prio is based on the following mechanism. Let’s say you’re interested in the average age of a certain number of users, but you want to preserve their privacy. You set up two (or more) piggy banks and ask each user to count out the number of coins corresponding to their age and, without showing them to anyone, randomly drop the coins into different money boxes.
Then you tip the coins out of the piggy banks into a pile, count them and divide by the number of users. The result is what you wanted: the average age of the users. And if at least one of the piggy banks keeps its secret (i.e., doesn’t tell anyone what went into it), then it’s impossible to determine how many coins any one user put into the boxes.
Prio’s main stages of information processing. Source
Prio overlays this basic mechanism with a lot of cryptography to protect information from interception and ensure the validity of data received. There’s no way for users to slip answers into the system, for whatever reason, that could distort the results. The main concept lies in the use of two or more aggregators that collect random shares of the sought information.
Prio’s algorithms have another key feature: they greatly improve system performance compared to previous methods of reliable anonymized data collection — by 50–100 times, say the researchers.
Mozilla got interested in Prio back in 2018. The first fruit of this interest was its development of the experimental system Firefox Origin Telemetry — based on Prio. Notably, this system was designed to privately gather telemetry on the browser’s ability to combat ad trackers.
Then, in February 2022, Mozilla unveiled Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA) technology, developed jointly with Meta, which, it seems, served as the prototype to PPA.
May 2022 saw the publication of a zero draft of the Prio-based Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP). The draft was authored by representatives of Mozilla and the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) — a non-profit known for the Let’s Encrypt project to democratize the use of HTTPS — as well as two Cloudflare employees.
While working on the protocol, ISRG was also building a DAP-based system for collecting anonymized statistics, known as Divvi Up. This system is primarily intended to collect various technical telemetry to improve website performance, such as page load-time.
Schematic of the basic operating principle of the DAP protocol. Source
Finally, in October 2023, Divvi Up and Mozilla announced a collaboration to implement DAP in the Firefox browser. As part of this joint effort, a system of two aggregators was created — one of which operates on the Mozilla side, the other on the Divvi Up side.
It’s this Divvi Up/Mozilla system that’s currently being deployed with PPA technology. So far, it’s just an experiment involving a limited number of sites.
In general outline, it works as follows:
The website asks the browser to remember instances of successful ad views.
If the user performs some action that the site considers useful (for example, buys a product), the site queries the browser to find out if the user saw the ad.
The browser doesn’t tell the site anything, but sends information through the DAP protocol to the aggregation servers.
All such reports are accumulated in aggregators, and the site periodically receives a summary.
As a result, the site learns that out of X number of users who saw a certain ad, Y number of users performed actions deemed useful for the site. But neither the site nor the aggregation system knows anything about who these users were, what else they did online, etc.
In the above-mentioned statement on Reddit, Firefox’s CTO explained what Mozilla was aiming for by introducing PPA along with the new version of its browser.
The company’s reasoning is roughly the following. Online advertising, at least at this stage of the internet’s development, is a necessary evil. And it’s understandable that advertisers want to be able to measure its effectiveness. But the tools currently used for this disregard user privacy.
Meanwhile, any talk about how to somehow restrict advertisers’ tracking of users’ actions is met with protests from the former. No data collection, they argue, means they’re deprived of a tool for assessing online advertising.
Basically, PPA is an experimental tool that allows advertisers to get the feedback they need without collecting and storing data on what users did.
If the experiment shows the technology can satisfy advertisers’ needs, it will give privacy advocates a weighty argument in future dealings with regulators and lawmakers. Broadly speaking, it will prove that total online surveillance is unnecessary, and should be limited by law.
As it happens, almost immediately after the uproar surrounding Mozilla’s new rollout, Google announced a complete reversal of its plans to disable third-party cookies. Getting rid of stale technology can be harder than it might seem — as Microsoft found out when trying to bury Internet Explorer.
The good news is that, unlike Internet Explorer, which is indeed hard to weed out of Windows, third-party cookies are something that users can handle on their own. All modern browsers make it easy to block them — see our guide for full details.
Bear in mind that Google’s refusal to get rid of cookies doesn’t spell the end of Ad Topics — the company intends to continue the experiment. So we recommend disabling this feature too, and here’s how to do it in Chrome and Android.
And if you use the Facebook mobile app, it’s worth turning off Link History. Again, our guide explains how.
Also, you can and should make use of the Private Browsing feature in our Kaspersky Standard, Kaspersky Plus and Kaspersky Premium subscription plans to block ad trackers (by no means all of which use cookies).
Lastly, we recommend using our free Privacy Checker service, where you can find instructions on setting up privacy for the most common applications, services and social networks for different operating systems.
As for PPA, the technology looks pretty useful. If you think otherwise, here are simple instructions to disable it in Firefox. As for me, I prefer to support the development of this technology, so will continue to use it in my browser.
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Data includes names, dates of birth, physical addresses, Social Security Numbers, medical and diagnosis information, and health insurance details.
The post Carespring Data Breach Exposes Personal and Medical Information of Nearly 77,000 Patients appeared first on SecurityWeek.
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Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a surge in malware infections stemming from malvertising campaigns distributing a loader called FakeBat.
“These attacks are opportunistic in nature, targeting users seeking popular business software,” the Mandiant Managed Defense team said in a technical report. “The infection utilizes a trojanized MSIX installer, which executes a PowerShell script to
The Hacker News – Read More
A new type of malware called UULoader is being used by threat actors to deliver next-stage payloads like Gh0st RAT and Mimikatz.
The Cyberint Research Team, which discovered the malware, said it’s distributed in the form of malicious installers for legitimate applications targeting Korean and Chinese speakers.
There is evidence pointing to UULoader being the work of a Chinese speaker due to the
The Hacker News – Read More
Azure domains and Google have been exploited to spread disinformation and malware in a sophisticated campaign that involves using several Microsoft Azure and OVH cloud subdomains along with Google search notifications.
Cyware News – Latest Cyber News – Read More
National Public Data (NPD) has confirmed suffering a data breach, but the company says the incident only affects 1.3 million people in the US.
The post National Public Data Says Breach Impacts 1.3 Million People appeared first on SecurityWeek.
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