Black Friday just got a bit more black. Target Corp., one of the U.S.’s leading retail outfits, confirmed in a statement Thursday morning that reports of a massive breach of the company’s payment infrastructure, resulting in the exposure of data on an estimated 40 million credit and debit card accounts. The statement, released on Target’s website, follows media reports on Wednesday citing reports from leading credit card issuers. In it, the company confirmed “it is aware of unauthorized access to payment card data that may have impacted certain guests making credit and debit card purchases in its U.S. stores.” According to statements by Target, the credit card data was stolen between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, 2013 and includes customer name, credit or debit card number, and the card’s expiration date and the CVV, or three-digit security code. Shoppers at the company’s U.S. stores were affected, but the breach did not affect Target’s Canadian […]
Identity Theft
Two Million Passwords Stolen From Facebook, Twitter, ADP
The passwords to access more than two million online accounts have been recovered from a server that is part of the command and control network for the Pony botnet, a large and active network of infected computers, according to a blog post from the security firm Trustwave. The company said that it found a cache of approximately two million compromised accounts, most from popular online services such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Twitter. More concerning: the cache also contained tens of thousands of credentials for FTP (File Transfer Protocol) servers, remote desktop and secure shell (SSH) accounts, and a site belonging to ADP, the payments processing firm. Facebook accounts made up the lion’s share of the haul, with 318,121 user credentials discovered – 57% of the total. Yahoo was the next biggest victim, with 59,549, almost 11% of the total. Leading Russian social networking sites vk.com and odnoklassniki.ru were also in […]
BitCoin’s Popularity Is Undermining Promises of Anonymity
The virtual currency Bitcoin has soared in value against the U.S. dollar in recent months, topping out a staggering $913 USD to 1 Bitcoin (or BTC) as of late Tuesday. The currency had many ups and downs since it was launched in January 2009. But its main attraction, all along, has been anonymity. Unlike any other online payment system, Bitcoin transactions – like cash transactions – cannot be traced back to specific individuals. Also like cash, they cannot be reversed. Both those factors give Bitcoin users the confidence that their online purchasing activity – whether computer hardware or contraband will remain private. But a group of researchers at two U.S. universities have released a paper that suggests reports of Bitcoin’s anonymity may (to paraphrase Twain) “be greatly exaggerated.” Specifically: the researchers found that, by culling a variety of open source data using public data from the Bitcoin Peer to Peer network and from […]
Snowden Borrowed from APT Playbook In NSA Hack
We know for sure that Edward Snowden made short work of the protections that the National Security Agency used to segregate classified data. Snowden’s revelations about government spying on foreign governments, domestic and foreign firms and…well…just about everyone else first appeared in print in May. Since that time, a looming question is “how?” In other words: how did a single contractor gain access to such a massive trove of classified intelligence while working for the most security conscious organization in the world? While the exact methods used by Snowden are still not known, there are many theories. Now the security firm Venafi thinks that it has an answer, and is challenging the NSA to prove it wrong. In a blog post on Wednesday, the company laid much of the blame on poor management of digital certificates and user credentials, which allowed Snowden to move laterally within the NSA’s classified […]
Hack Uses Phone’s Camera and Mic To Best Anti-Keylogger
Smart phones these days are bristling with sensors. Forget about the camera and microphone – there are accelerometers, Global Positioning System components, not to mention Bluetooth and NFC transmitters. All those remote sensors enable all kinds of cool features – from finding the nearest Starbucks to mobile payments. But they also pose a risk to the privacy of the phone’s owner – as malicious actors (and the occasional national government) look for ways to turn cameras and other sensors into powerful, cheap and convenient spying tools. Now researchers at The University of Cambridge have demonstrated one possible, new attack type: harnessing the built-in video camera and microphone on Android devices to spy on an owner’s movements and guess his or her password. The technique could be a way for cyber criminals to defeat anti-keylogging technology like secure “soft” keyboards used to enter banking PINs and other sensitive information. The work […]
