Adobe

Ted Julian - Co3

The Security Week In Review: Same Breach, Different Day

It’s the end of another week and, as has become a pattern, we’re weighing the impact of  another massive data breach: this one at Cupid Media, the owner of a network of dating web sites. According to a report on Krebsonsecurity.com, data on some 40 million Cupid Media customers turned up on the same servers that were found holding data stolen from Adobe Inc., PR Newswire and other victims. To get a handle on the impact of this breach and others like it, I invited Ted Julian, the Chief Marketing Officer of CO3 Systems, to talk about the recent string of embarrassing breaches and how companies go wrong (and sometimes right) in responding to them. Co3 sells a service that helps companies structure their response to data breaches and other adverse incidents. We also took the time to talk about the recent FTC Workshop on security and privacy on The […]

Week In Security: NSA Spies on Yahoo & Google, Adobe Hack and Healthcare.gov

There’s nothing like a Sunday morning for looking back over the week’s events and trying to make sense of at all – or at least what sense there is to be had. This Sunday was no different – especially after a week that saw continued revelations stemming from Edward Snowden’s leak of classified intelligence on NSA spying, the massive hack of software maker Adobe. Then there was the botched rollout of the federal Healthcare.gov marketplace – which morphed into an even bigger, uglier problem as the week progressed. To help me sort it all out, I called on Nick Selby, the CEO of StreetCred Software and an authority on cyber security, law enforcement, government procurement, Russia, Germany, aviation, travel journalism and all manner of other topics. I love talking to Nick because his wealth of life and professional experience make him predictably unpredictable when it comes to interpreting current events. […]

Report: Adobe Data Breach Ten Times Bigger Than First Reported

The huge security breach at software maker Adobe is even bigger than first reported, with more than 150 million credentials stolen, including records on up to 38 million active customers, according to a report by Brian Krebs at the web site Krebsonsecurity.com. Krebs said in a story posted Tuesday that Adobe’s initial estimates that user names and passwords for around three million customers was well short of the actual number taken by hackers who breached the company’s network. Citing a file posted by the website Anonnews.org, Krebs said the actual number of affected Adobe accounts stolen is much larger: 150 million username and hashed password pairs including credentials for 38 million “active” accounts, according to Adobe spokesperson Heather Edell. Edell told Krebs that Adobe has just completed a campaign to contact active users whose user IDs and encrypted passwords were stolen (including this author). Those customers are being encouraged to change […]

Bombshell: Adobe Says Massive Hack Netted Source Code, Customer Info

In what sounds like a worst-case scenario, Adobe Corp. admitted on Thursday that a massive breach of its corporate network resulted in the theft of information on close to three million customers and source code for two widely-used products: Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat Publisher, Cold Fusion and “other” as-yet undisclosed products. The news came in a string of announcements late Thursday on Adobe’s corporate blog as well as the news site Krebsonsecurity.com. The revelation came after Brian Krebs, the reporter behind that site, and Alex Holden, the Chief Security Officer of Hold Security, discovered what is described as “a massive 40 GB source code trove stashed on a server used by the same cyber criminals believed to have hacked into major data aggregators earlier this year, including LexisNexis, Dun & Bradstreet and Kroll.” After being informed of the find, Adobe investigated and acknowledged the theft. In a blog post by Chief […]

Black Hat Briefings

Missing in Action At BlackHat: The PC

Once the target of choice for hackers of all stripes, personal computers (PC) will be -at most- a side attraction at this year’s annual Black Hat Briefings show in Las Vegas, where presentations on ways to attack mobile devices and other networked “stuff” will take center stage. Just over ten percent of the scheduled talks and turbo talks at The Black Hat Briefings in early August (5 of 47)  will be devoted to attacks against what might be considered “traditional” endpoints, like end user systems and servers running Microsoft’s Windows, Apple’s Mac OSX and Linux. By contrast, more than 30% will discuss security flaws and attacks against mobile phones or other “smart” devices including wireless surveillance cameras, home automation systems and smart meters. The dearth of PC-focused talks isn’t a new trend in and of itself. As far back as 2006, talks that explicitly discussed security issues with components of Microsoft’s […]