Tag: data privacy

Microsoft Uses Courts To Take Down Malicious, Managed DNS Services

Microsoft Corp. has taken action against yet another cyber crime network, taking control of- and shutting down a managed DNS (domain name system) operated by the firm No-IP that were being abused by cyber criminals, the company said on Monday.   The domains were associated with malware families named Jenxcus and Bladabindi that are believed to have infected on some 7.5 million systems, globally. The malicious programs – which are used to spy on the operators of infected systems – use Dynamic DNS services like NO-IP to communicate with command and control systems used to manage infected systems. Dynamic DNS makes the malicious systems more difficult to trace. In a post on Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit blog, Richard Domingues Boscovich, the company’s Assistant General Counsel said that the company had filed a civil case on June 19 naming two foreign nationals: Mohamed Benabdellah and Naser Al Mutairi along with a U.S. company, Vitalwerks Internet Solutions, LLC (doing […]

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This Week In Security: Poking Holes In Two Factor Authentication

It was another busy week in the security world. There was big news on the legal front, as The U.S. Supreme Court took steps to protect the data stored on mobile devices from warrantless searches by police. (That’s good news.) But the week also plenty of concerning stories about the security of data stored on mobile phones, tablets and the like. One of the stories that gained a lot of attention was DUO Security’s report on a flaw in PayPal’s two factor authentication feature that could expose the accounts of  security-conscious PayPal users. As The Security Ledger reported, DUO researcher Zach Lanier discovered a flaw in mobile APIs published by PayPal that would allow anyone with a valid PayPal user name and password to sidestep two-factor authentication when accessing PayPal accounts that had that option enabled. After DUO went public with information on the flaw, PayPal disabled two factor authentication […]

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Paypal Disables Two Factor From Mobile

In the wake of a disclosure, yesterday, that a secure log-in feature was vulnerable to hacking, PayPal has suspended the ability of customers who elect to use the feature to log in to PayPal using the company’s mobile application. In a blog post on Wednesday, PayPal Director of Global Initiatives Anuj Nayar said that the company took the step of disabling mobile application log ins after the researcher, Zach Lanier of DUO Security, published his findings in a blog post yesterday. As reported by The Security Ledger, researcher Zach Lanier of DUO Labs discovered that a PayPal mobile API (application program interface) for its Security Key two-factor authentication technology contains a vulnerability that would allow even a non-technical hacker to bypass the second factor when accessing a Paypal customer’s account. The problem comes up when trying to access a Paypal account protected using two-factor authentication using a PayPal mobile application – […]

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Researchers Sidestep Paypal Two-Factor Authentication

Researchers at DUO Security claim to have found a way of bypassing a two factor authentication feature that secures logins to Paypal.com, eBay’s online payment service. The vulnerability could allow an attacker who has stolen a Paypal customer’s user name and password to gain access to the account, even though the customer had enabled the more secure two-factor authentication option. DUO described the problem in a blog post early Wednesday. According to researcher Zach Lanier, Paypal has published an API (application program interface) for its Security Key two-factor authentication technology that contains a vulnerability that would allow even a non-technical hacker to bypass the second factor when accessing a Paypal customer’s account. An attacker only needs a victim’s PayPal username and password in order to access a two-factor protected account and send money. “The protection offered by the two-factor Security Key mechanism can be bypassed and essentially nullified,” the company wrote in […]

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Code Spaces Probably A ‘Target of Opportunity’

The spectacular collapse this week of Code Spaces, a cloud-based code repository, may have been the result of a an unspectacular “opportunistic” hack, rather than a targeted operation, according to one cloud security expert. The sudden demise of the online application repository has sent shock waves through the tech industry, laying bare what some say are lax practices among many cloud-based application and infrastructure providers. But the attack itself was almost certainly the result of a larger, indiscriminate cyber criminal campaign, said Jeff Schilling, the Chief Security Officer of Firehost, a Texas-based secure cloud provider. “This is something we pretty frequently: companies get held ransom with a DDoS attack, and if that doesn’t work, (the attackers) will resort to doing other things,” Schilling told The Security Ledger. But Code Spaces almost certainly wasn’t the only company the extortionists worked on, Schilling said. Instead, the company was likely caught up in a wide net […]

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