The FBI statement was definitive: “The North Korean government is responsible” for the cyberattack on Sony.
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Obama: Sony “made a mistake” pulling movie
The attack was routed through servers in countries all over the world in an effort to hide its origin, but President Obama said North Korea is the sole culprit. How the Sony hack was traced back to North Korea:
Yesterday I received a strange email displayed below. The email stated, “You’ve been compromised by cyberselfie” in the subject line. The email went on further to state.
“The security of a pentesting lab… a fucking joke…and they expect people to pay for such a crappy platform where the security is shit!!!
http://pastebin.com/c5a4bb1z
http://www.zone-h.org/mirror/id/23304152
http://www.zone-h.org/mirror/id/23304154”
I knew I had created an account on CTF365.com a while ago, I had heard some really good things about the site at a security conference, so my interested peaked and I immediately went over the their site. When I got there to my surprise I was greeted with the following page.
So what is CTF365.com?
CTF365 is a “Security Training Platform for IT industry with a focus on Security Professionals, System Administrators and Web Developers”. The Platform implements CTF (Capture The Flag) concepts and leverages gamification mechanics to improve retention rate and speed up the learning/training curve.
As of this morning, the site is still not functional, but we hope they can recover soon. The site provided a great training platform to individuals interested in learning more about information security defense and attacks in a fun manner. I have reached out to the staff on CTF365.com for more information. Below are some of their resent tweet about the breach.
So far only username and email addresses were exposed. Investigation continue. #CTF365
— CTF365 (@CTF365) November 25, 2014
We’ll keep updates in here FB and G+ @securityorb Investigation continue.
— CTF365 (@CTF365) November 25, 2014
As we discover more information we will share it with you all.
Hackers working for the Chinese government are suspected of breaking into the US Postal Service’s network and stealing the personal information of over 800,000 workers. The breach expose employees’ names, birth-dates, Social Security numbers, addresses, dates of employment and emergency contact information.
The breach may have also exposed the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of customers who contacted the Postal Service Customer Care Center by phone or email between January 1, 2014 and August 16, 2014.
The Washington Post reports that Chinese government hackers are believed to have been responsible for the attack. “For the Chinese, this is probably a way of building their inventory on U.S. persons for counterintelligence and recruitment purposes,” Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow James A. Lewis told the Post.
“The privacy and security of data entrusted to us is of the utmost importance,” U.S. Postal Service manager of media relations David Partenheimer said in a statement [PDF]. “We have recently implemented additional security measures designed to improve the security of our information systems, including certain actions this past weekend that caused certain systems to be offline. We know this caused inconvenience to some of our customers and partners, and we apologize for any disruption.”
The breach serves as a reminder that data is the new currency — and that’s true for both customer and employee data.
Emil Kvarnhammar
A new critical vulnerability titled “Rootpipe” affecting the Mac OS X operating system has been discovered courtesy of Swedish security researcher and consultant Emil Kvarnhammar (@emilkvarnhammar).
The vulnerability allows the malicious user the ability to escalate administrative privileges on a compromised system as well as allows them to obtain the highest level of access known as “root’ access. In doing so, the malicious user could bypass the built-in safeguards that are supposed to stop individuals who try to root the operating system through a temporary backdoor.
Speaking at a Developer Conference in Sweden, Kvarnhammar demonstrated the privilege escalation vulnerability on OS X 10.8.5 through the newest 10.10 Yosemite.
Once exploited, hackers could install malicious software or even make other changes to the system without any need of a password. From there they could also steal sensitive information such as passwords or bank account information, or delete all of the data from the computer.
Kvarnhammar reached out to Apple about the issue but initially didn’t get any response, Apple requested additional details in which he did provide. Since then Apple has requested he not to disclose the exploit until they are able to produce a patch in January 2015.
Apple OS X users affected by the “Rootpipe” vulnerability are advised to follow the below steps in order to protect themselves:
• Avoid running the system on a daily basis with an admin account. An attacker that will gain control on this account will obtain anyway limited privileges.
Kvarnhammar also recommended using FileVault, Apple’s hard drive encryption for Mac users, noting “This is a great way of protecting your data, especially if your computer gets stolen.”
However, the best way to protect yourself from such security vulnerabilities is to ensure that the operating system running on your system is always up-to-date, and always be careful to the links and documents others send to you.
That massive number, tallied for CNNMoney by Ponemon Institute researchers, is made even more mind-boggling by the amount of hacked accounts: up to 432 million.
The exact number of exposed accounts is hard to pin down, because some companies — such as AOL (AOL) and eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) — aren’t fully transparent about the details of their cyber breaches. But that’s the best estimate available with the data tracked by the Identity Theft Resource Center and CNNMoney’s own review of corporate disclosures.
The damage is real. Each record typically includes personal information, such as your name, debit or credit card, email, phone number, birthday, password, security questions and physical address.
Read more here.
The U.S. Justice Department today announced a series of actions against more than 100 people accused of purchasing and using “Blackshades,” a password-stealing Trojan horse program designed to infect computers throughout the world to spy on victims through their web cameras, steal files and account information, and log victims’ key strokes. While any effort that discourages the use of point-and-click tools for ill-gotten gains is a welcome development, the most remarkable aspect of this crackdown is that those who were targeted in this operation lacked any clue that it was forthcoming.
RE: February 22nd, 2014 Security Breach on EC-Council
On February 22nd, 2014 at approximately 8PM EST, the domain www.eccouncil.org was redirected to an ISP in Finland. Immediately EC Council’s Internal Security Response team initiated a comprehensive investigation.
EC-Council’s Security Team has confirmed no access to any EC-Council Servers was obtained, the domain redirection was done at the DNS Registrar and traffic was re-routed from Authentic EC-Council Servers to a Host in Finland known for hosting other illegal websites. EC-Council immediately began exercises in security precaution to fortify against any further attempts. EC-Council immediately opened cases with the United States FBI as well as international Law Enforcement to apprehend this individual and launched a full analysis of third party vendors where the security breach was allowed.
The affected records reside with a Third-Party, ICANN certified DNS Registrar and though EC-Council has terminated service there and moved, DNS propagation will take some time. During the DNS propagation period, eccouncil.org will be unavailable to the public. While EC-Council Servers remained untouched and running, the third-party DNS registrar remained affected through the day on Sunday February 23rd and into the morning Monday February 24th. EC-Council in Cooperation with domestic and foreign Law Enforcement as well as Judicial Systems will continue to investigate the incident.
EC-Council will release additional information through its official Facebook page as well as LinkedIn as details come available.
Original statement located on their FaceBook Page – https://www.facebook.com/ECCouncil
Over the weekend, and as of today at 11:00am EST, EC-Council, the organization famous for administering the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) as well as the Computer Hacking Forensics Investigator (CHFI) had been hacked by an individual who claims to be a “certified unethical software security professional” going by the alias “Eugene Belford”. Eugene Belford was actually a character in the movie “Hackers” which came out in 1995 directed by Iain Softley as well as staring Angelina Jolie.
The hacked website was defaced with a picture of Edward Snowden’s passport and e-mail application for the CEH exam as shown here. In addition to the images the individual responsible for the site compromise, published the following message:
“owned by certified unethical software security professional -Eugene Belford”. Eugene Belford, is a character from the movie “Hackers”.
Then a few hours later updated the message to the following:
“owned by certified unethical software security professional
Obligatory link: http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/ec-council/-Eugene Belford
P.S It seems like lots of you are missing the point here, I’m sitting on thousands of passports belonging to LE (and .mil) officials”.
It did seem many individuals who followed this event in its early stages missed the point pertaining to the unauthorized access and control of personal identifiable information of EC-Council certified professionals now in someone else’s hand. And due to DoDD 8570 requirements many of these professionals are members of the US military, the FBI, and the National Security Agency just to name a few.
This assertion comes from EC-Council claim that it “has trained over 80,000 individuals and certified more than 30,000 security professionals from such fine organizations as the US Army, the FBI, Microsoft, IBM, and the United Nations”.
It is highly probably that passports and other photo ID details of approximately 30,000 security professionals who have either obtained or applied for EC-Council related certifications are now at risk after this compromise.
With the recent holiday breaches of 2013 so fresh in our minds, this is just another reminder about how safe is our information in the hand of others.
securityorb.com/ has attempted to contact EC-Council but there was no response as of this publishing this article. securityorb.com/ will continue to make attempts to obtain a statement as well as update any new findings we discover.
As of Saturday, February 22, 2014 at 8:00pm EST, it seems like the main website operated by EC-Council has been hacked. On the site is an image of Edward Snowden’s passport and text stating, “owned by certified unethical software security professional -Eugene Belford”. Eugene Belford, is a character from the movie “Hackers”.
Edward Snowden, the man who turned whistle-blower against the National Security Agency (NSA) and revealed its global spying program, was trained by EC-Council as a Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH).
The hack maybe a DNS hijacking attack, the information below kind of point that way:
Server: 75.75.75.75
Address: 75.75.75.75#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: eccouncil.org
Address: 93.174.95.82
As of Feb. 23, it seems as though EC-Council has not gained control of their website. An update was posted on the EC-Council site stating:
“owned by certified unethical software security professional
Obligatory link: http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/ec-council/ -Eugene Belford
P.S It seems like lots of you are missing the point here, I’m sitting on thousands of passports belonging to LE (and .mil) officials”
From the Associated Press:
Usernames and passwords of some of Yahoo’s email customers have been stolen and used to gather personal information about people those Yahoo mail users have recently corresponded with, the company said Thursday.
Yahoo didn’t say how many accounts have been affected. Yahoo is the second-largest email service worldwide, after Google’s Gmail, according to the research firm comScore. There are 273 million Yahoo mail accounts worldwide, including 81 million in the U.S.
It’s the latest in a string of security breaches that have allowed hackers to nab personal information using software that analysts say is ever more sophisticated. Up to 70 million customers of Target stores had their personal information and credit and debit card numbers compromised late last year, and Neiman Marcus was the victim of a similar breach in December.
“It’s an old trend, but it’s much more exaggerated now because the programs the bad guys use are much more sophisticated now,” says Avivah Litan, a security analyst at the technology research firm Gartner. “We’re clearly under attack.”
Yahoo Inc. said in a blog post on its breach that “The information sought in the attack seems to be names and email addresses from the affected accounts’ most recent sent emails.”
That could mean hackers were looking for additional email addresses to send spam or scam messages. By grabbing real names from those sent folders, hackers could try to make bogus messages appear more legitimate to recipients.
“It’s much more likely that I’d click on something from you if we email all the time,” says Richard Mogull, analyst and CEO of Securois, a security research and advisory firm.
The bigger danger: access to email accounts could lead to more serious breaches involving banking and shopping sites. That’s because many people reuse passwords across many sites, and also because many sites use email to reset passwords. Hackers could try logging in to such a site with the Yahoo email address, for instance, and ask that a password reminder be sent by email.
Litan said hackers appear to be “trying to collect as much information as they can on people. Putting all this stuff together makes it easier to steal somebody’s identity.”
Yahoo said the usernames and passwords weren’t collected from its own systems, but from a third-party database.
Because so many people use the same passwords across multiple sites, it’s possible hackers broke in to some service that lets people use email addresses as their usernames. The hackers could have grabbed passwords stored at that service, filtered out the accounts with Yahoo addresses and used that information to log in to Yahoo’s mail systems, said Johannes Ullrich, dean of research at the SANS Institute, a group devoted to security research and education.
The breach is the second mishap for Yahoo’s mail service in two months. In December, the service suffered a multi-day outage that prompted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to issue an apology.
Yahoo said it is resetting passwords on affected accounts and has “implemented additional measures” to block further attacks. The company would not comment beyond the information in its blog post. It said it is working with federal law enforcement.
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Online:
Yahoo blog post:
http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/75083532312/important-security-update-for-yahoo-mail-users