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Home Depot Acknowledges Breach of Payment Systems

Almost a week after public reports named Home Depot as a possible victim of a sophisticated cyber attack, the home improvement giant has acknowledged that it was hacked.   In a statement on Monday, Home Depot said that an internal investigation confirmed a “breach of our payment data systems” took place. The breach affects the company’s U.S. and Canadian stores, though not its Mexican locations or online transactions, the company said. The incident also appears to have been long-lived. Home Depot estimates that the breach dates to April, 2014. The company did not say when it was finally shut down – though that date could be as late as July. Home Depot has been investigating the incident since it was first disclosed by Brian Krebs at the blog Krebsonsecurity. Krebs was alerted to the incident after large quantities of stolen credit cards began appearing on cyber criminal forums. Sources at […]

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Ahead of Apple’s Announcement: The Security Implications of Wearables | Trend Micro

The world’s attention will be focused on Apple this week and on the topic of wearables. In an event on Tuesday, the Cupertino company is planning to unveil the latest additions to its popular iPhone line along with a wearable device that most folks are just calling the ‘iWatch.’ But as Apple wrestles with the security of its growing stable of mobile devices and the cloud infrastructure that supports them, what will the impact of wearables be? Well, the folks over at Trend Micro are putting together a series of blog posts that look at that very question. Namely: the (information) security implications of wearables. It makes for some interesting reading. Among other things, Trend There are three very broad categories that we can use to describe what we are talking about. The posts, by Senior Threat Researcher David Sancho, break down the wearables space into three categories:  ‘IN’ devices like sensors, ‘OUT’ […]

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Report: Apple IDs Targeted by Kelihos Botnet

There’s an interesting post over on Symantec’s blog about a shift noted in the behavior of the Kelihos botnet in recent days. According to Symantec, Kelihos operators have turned their attention to Apple customers, launching a phishing email campaign aimed at Apple iCloud users and Apple ID’s and passwords. According to the post, Symantec has observed Kelihos (also known as Waledac) being used to send spam emails purporting to be from Apple, informing the victim that a purchase has been made using their account on the iTunes Store. Samples of the emails discovered by Symantec bear the subject line “Pending Authorisation Notification.” The body of the phishing email says that the victim’s account has been used to purchase the film “Lane Splitter” on a computer or device that hadn’t previously been linked to their Apple ID. The email gives an IP address that was used to make the alleged purchase and […]

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Exploding Gas Tanks: Risk, Liability and Internet of Things

We like to construct Hollywood friendly plots around a lot of the seminal moments in our collective history. For Civil Rights, we like to picture the integration of Little Rock High School, Rosa Parks’ courageous protest on a Montgomery bus or the March on Washington. For environmentalism, we talk about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or, maybe, the burning Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. (This vintage news footage of the 1969 fire calls it the fire that “sparked the environmental movement” without any apparent irony.) For automobile safety, we imagine Ralph Nader and the image of a 1972 crash test that shows the gas tank of the Ford Pinto exploding in a rear impact collision, engulfing both cars in flames. But those memories are often way oversimplified. Little Rock and the Montgomery bus boycott were just two battles in a fight for civil rights that went back to the end of the Civil War. Likewise, the Cuyahoga […]

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What Hollywood Can Teach Us: Passwords Matter More Than Ever

Andrey Belenko had what you might call a ‘brush with infamy’ earlier this week after a presentation he took part in on the security of Apple’s iCloud became a set piece in the news media scramble to identify the source of a huge trove of leaked celebrity photos – many depicting Hollywood A-List stars in various states of undress. “It’s not the kind of attention you want to receive,” said Belenko, a security researcher with the firm ViaForensics. “It’s all really creepy stuff.” Belenko’s link to the celebrity hacking scandal was a matter of happenstance. He was scheduled to give a presentation at a small, St. Petersburg multi-media conference, Chaos Constructions, over the weekend. Belenko was presenting research he had conducted a year earlier on the security of Apple’s KeyChain technology and iCloud – a talk he had given twice before in the last year. Prior to his talk, Belenko […]

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