Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, have agreed to pay out $10 million dollars to a competitor after admitting to hiring a former employee to hack into the rival company’s computer network.

According to a statement issued by the Justice Department on Wednesday, the five criminal counts facing Ticketmaster stemmed from a plot to infiltrate the computer system of ticket-seller rival CrowdSurge in a self-described attempt to “cut [the company] off at the knees.”

“Ticketmaster employees repeatedly — and illegally — accessed a competitor’s computers without authorization using stolen passwords to unlawfully collect business intelligence,” acting US attorney Seth DuCharme said in the statement. “Further, Ticketmaster’s employees brazenly held a division-wide ‘summit’ at which the stolen passwords were used to access the victim company’s computers.”

The hacking plot was first reported in 2017, shortly after CrowdSurge filed an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation. At some point prior to that filing, Live Nation had apparently recruited an employee named Stephen Mead, whom the company had poached from CrowdSurge in 2013, to turn on his former employer, offering data analytics and insider secrets to top executives in an attempt to hobble the competitor.

Mead’s knowledge of his former employer’s passwords was so extensive that it enabled him to log in to the company’s backend during a 2014 Live Nation summit, where he reportedly offered executives a “product review” of CrowdSurge’s operations and led a demonstration of the smaller company’s internal systems.

In a statement to The Verge, a Ticketmaster spokesperson said that the company was satisfied with the terms of the settlement, and stressed that both Mead and Zeeshan Zaidi — Ticketmaster’s former general manager of artist services — had both been terminated as a result of an investigation into the wrongdoing.

Source: Ticketmaster To Pay $10 million After Illegally Hacking Rival’s System

A group of mysterious hackers has carried out a clever supply chain attack against Vietnamese private companies and government agencies by inserting malware inside an official government software toolkit.

The attack, discovered by security firm ESET and detailed in a report named “Operation SignSight,” targeted the Vietnam Government Certification Authority (VGCA), the government organization that issues digital certificates that can be used to electronically sign official documents.

Any Vietnamese citizen, private company, and even other government agency that wants to submit files to the Vietnamese government must sign their documents with a VGCA-compatible digital certificate.

The VGCA doesn’t only issue these digital certificates but also provides ready-made and user-friendly “client apps” that citizens, private companies, and government workers can install on their computers and automate the process of signing a document.

But ESET says that sometime this year, hackers broke into the agency’s website, located at ca.gov.vn, and inserted malware inside two of the VGCA client apps offered for download on the site.

The two files were 32-bit (gca01-client-v2-x32-8.3.msi) and 64-bit (gca01-client-v2-x64-8.3.msi) client apps for Windows users.

ESET says that between July 23 and August 5, this year, the two files contained a backdoor trojan named PhantomNet, also known as Smanager.

The malware wasn’t very complex but was merely a wireframe for more potent plugins, researchers said.

Known plugins included the functionality to retrieve proxy settings in order to bypass corporate firewalls and the ability to download and run other (malicious) apps.

The security firm believes the backdoor was used for reconnaissance prior to a more complex attack against selected targets.

[…]

PantomNet victims also discovered in the Philippines

ESET said that it also found victims infected with the PhantomNet backdoor in the Philippines but was unable to say how these users got infected. Another delivery mechanism is suspected.

The Slovak security firm didn’t formally attribute the attack to any particular group, but previous reports linked the PhatomNet (Smanager) malware to Chinese state-sponsored cyber-espionage activities.

The VGCA incident marks the fifth major supply chain attack this year after the likes of:

• SolarWinds – Russian hackers compromised the update mechanism of the SolarWinds Orion app and infected the internal networks of thousands of companies across the glove with the Sunburst malware.
• Able Desktop – Chinese hackers have compromised the update mechanism of a chat app used by hundreds of Mongolian government agencies.
• GoldenSpy – A Chinese bank had been forcing foreign companies activating in China to install a backdoored tax software toolkit.
• Wizvera VeraPort – North Korean hackers compromised the Wizvera VeraPort system to deliver malware to South Korean users.

Source: Vietnam targeted in complex supply chain attack | ZDNet

Dozens of people who say they were subjected to death threats, racial slurs, and blackmail after their in-home Ring smart cameras were hacked are suing the company over “horrific” invasions of privacy.

A new class action lawsuit, which combines a number of cases filed in recent years, alleges that lax security measures at Ring, which is owned by Amazon, allowed hackers to take over their devices. Ring provides home security in the form of smart cameras that are often installed on doorbells or inside people’s homes.

The suit against Ring builds on previous cases, joining together complaints filed by more than 30 people in 15 families who say their devices were hacked and used to harass them. In response to these attacks, Ring “blamed the victims, and offered inadequate responses and spurious explanations”, the suit alleges. The plaintiffs also claim the company has also failed to adequately update its security measures in the aftermath of such hacks.

[…]

The suit outlines examples of hackers taking over Ring cameras, screaming obscenities, demanding ransoms, and threatening murder and sexual assault.

One Ring user says he was asked through his camera as he watched TV one night, “What are you watching?” Another alleges his children were addressed by an unknown hacker through the device, who commented on their basketball play and encouraged them to approach the camera.

In one case, an older woman at an assisted living facility was allegedly told “tonight you die” and sexually harassed through the camera. Due to the distress caused by the hack she ultimately had to move back in with her family, feeling unsafe in the facility where she once lived.

[…]

Repeatedly, Ring blamed victims for not using sufficiently strong passwords, the suit claims. It says Ring should have required users to establish complicated passwords when setting up the devices and implement two-factor authentication, which adds a second layer of security using a second form of identification, such as a phone number.

However, as the lawsuit alleges, Ring was hacked in 2019 – meaning the stolen credentials from that breach may have been used to get into users’ cameras. That means the hacks that Ring has allegedly blamed on customers may have been caused by Ring itself. A spokesperson said the company did not comment on ongoing litigation.

The lawsuit also cites research from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others that Ring violates user privacy by using a number of third-party trackers on its app.

The suit said that, at present, Ring “has not sufficiently improved its security practices or responded adequately to the ongoing threats its products pose to its customers”. Security and privacy experts have also criticized Ring’s response.

[…]

In addition to hacking concerns, Ring has faced increasing criticism for its growing surveillance partnership with police forces. Ring has now created law enforcement partnerships, which allow users to send footage and photos to police, in more than 1,300 cities.

“Ring’s surveillance-based business model is fundamentally incompatible with civil rights and democracy,” Greer said. “These devices, and the thinking behind them, should be melted down and never spoken of again.”

Source: Dozens sue Amazon’s Ring after camera hack leads to threats and racial slurs | Amazon | The Guardian

Earlier this month, the book industry website Publishers Marketplace announced that Little, Brown would be publishing “Re-Entry,” a novel by James Hannaham about a transgender woman paroled from a men’s prison. The book would be edited by Ben George.

Two days later, Mr. Hannaham got an email from Mr. George, asking him to send the latest draft of his manuscript. The email came to an address on Mr. Hannaham’s website that he rarely uses, so he opened up his usual account, attached the document, typed in Mr. George’s email address and a little note, and hit send.

“Then Ben called me,” Mr. Hannaham said, “to say, ‘That wasn’t me.’”

Mr. Hannaham was just one of countless targets in a mysterious international phishing scam that has been tricking writers, editors, agents and anyone in their orbit into sharing unpublished book manuscripts. It isn’t clear who the thief or thieves are, or even how they might profit from the scheme. High-profile authors like Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan have been targeted, along with celebrities like Ethan Hawke. But short story collections and works by little-known debut writers have been attacked as well, even though they would have no obvious value on the black market.

In fact, the manuscripts do not appear to wind up on the black market at all, or anywhere on the dark web, and no ransoms have been demanded. When copies of the manuscripts get out, they just seem to vanish. So why is this happening?

[…]

Whoever the thief is, he or she knows how publishing works, and has mapped out the connections between authors and the constellation of agents, publishers and editors who would have access to their material. This person understands the path a manuscript takes from submission to publication, and is at ease with insider lingo like “ms” instead of manuscript.

Emails are tailored so they appear to be sent by a particular agent writing to one of her authors, or an editor contacting a scout, with tiny changes made to the domain names — like penguinrandornhouse.com instead of penguinrandomhouse.com, an “rn” in place of an “m” — that are masked, and so only visible when the target hits reply.

“They know who our clients are, they know how we interact with our clients, where sub-agents fit in and where primary agents fit in,” said Catherine Eccles, owner of a literary scouting agency in London. “They’re very, very good.”

This phishing exercise began at least three years ago, and has targeted authors, agents and publishers in places like Sweden, Taiwan, Israel and Italy. This year, the volume of these emails exploded in the United States, reaching even higher levels in the fall around the time of the Frankfurt Book Fair, which, like most everything else this year, was held online.

[…]

Often, these phishing emails make use of public information, like book deals announced online, including on social media. Ms. Sweeney’s second book, however, hadn’t yet been announced anywhere, but the phisher knew about it in detail, down to Ms. Sweeney’s deadline and the names of the novel’s main characters.

[…]

Ms. Sweeney’s first book was a best seller, so she, like well-known authors Jo Nesbo and Michael J. Fox, may be an obvious choice. But the scammer has also requested experimental novels, short story collections and recently sold books by first-time authors. Meanwhile, Bob Woodward’s book “Rage,” which came out in September, was never targeted, Mr. Woodward said.

“If this were just targeting the John Grishams and the J.K. Rowlings, you could come up with a different theory,” said Dan Strone, chief executive of the literary agency Trident Media Group. “But when you’re talking about the value of a debut author, there is literally no immediate value in putting it on the internet, because nobody has heard of this person.”

One of the leading theories in the publishing world, which is rife with speculation over the thefts, is that they are the work of someone in the literary scouting community. Scouts arrange for the sale of book rights to international publishers as well as to film and television producers, and what their clients pay for is early access to information — so an unedited manuscript, for example, would have value to them.

“The pattern it resembles is what I do,” said Kelly Farber, a literary scout, “which is I get everything.”

Cybercriminals regularly trade pirated movies and books on the dark web, alongside stolen passwords and Social Security numbers. Yet a broad search of dark web channels, like the Pirate Warez website, an underground forum for pirated goods, didn’t yield anything meaningful when searching for “manuscripts,” “unpublished” or “upcoming book,” or the titles of several purloined manuscripts.

[…]

Apparently nobody has posted them online out of spite or tried to entice eager fans to turn over their credit card information in exchange for an early glimpse. There have been no ransom demands of the authors by extortionists threatening to dump the authors’ years of work online if they don’t pay up. In this absence, and with no clear monetization strategy to the thief’s or thieves’ efforts, cybersecurity experts have been left scratching their heads.

[…]

“The trouble they went to — fabricating conversations with trusted people and sort of acting as if they are filling in the target on those conversations to grant themselves credibility — definitely demonstrates very specific targeting, and probably more effort than we see in most phishing emails,” said Roman Sannikov, a threat analyst at Recorded Future whom The Times asked to review the emails.

[…]

Source: Why on Earth Is Someone Stealing Unpublished Book Manuscripts? – The New York Times

Journalists appear to have fallen prone to a particularly sophisticated digital espionage campaign. According to the Guardian, Citizen Lab has discovered that operators using NSO Group software, nicknamed Kismet, hacked the iPhones of 37 journalists (most from Al Jazeera) using an iMessage vulnerability that had been present for roughly a year. The zero-click attacks left no trace and would have allowed access to passwords, microphone audio and even snapping photos.

The exact motivations aren’t clear, but there were four operators that appear to have origins in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and, in at least two cases, acted on the government’s behalf. One victim, Al Araby’s Rania Dridi, believed she might have been a target due to her discussions of women’s rights and her link to an outspoken critic of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. One target reportedly received spyware links like those used to snoop on UAE activist Ahmed Mansoor in 2016.

The exploit doesn’t appear to work in iOS 14.

Source: iPhone security flaw let spies hack dozens of Al Jazeera journalists | Engadget

A second hacking group, different from the suspected Russian team now associated with the major SolarWinds data breach, also targeted the company’s products earlier this year, according to a security research blog by Microsoft.

“The investigation of the whole SolarWinds compromise led to the discovery of an additional malware that also affects the SolarWinds Orion product but has been determined to be likely unrelated to this compromise and used by a different threat actor,” the blog said.

Security experts told Reuters this second effort is known as “SUPERNOVA.” It is a piece of malware that imitates SolarWinds’ Orion product but it is not “digitally signed” like the other attack, suggesting this second group of hackers did not share access to the network management company’s internal systems.

It is unclear whether SUPERNOVA has been deployed against any targets, such as customers of SolarWinds. The malware appears to have been created in late March, based on a review of the file’s compile times.

The new finding shows how more than one sophisticated hacking group viewed SolarWinds, an Austin, Texas-based company that was not a household name until this month, as an important gateway to penetrate other targets.

Source: Second hacking team was targeting SolarWinds at time of big breach | Reuters

Microsoft Blog: Analyzing Solorigate, the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack, and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers

There was not a database or an IT deployment model out there to which his Austin, Texas-based company did not provide some level of monitoring or management, he told analysts on the Oct. 27 call.

“We don’t think anyone else in the market is really even close in terms of the breadth of coverage we have,” he said. “We manage everyone’s network gear.”

Now that dominance has become a liability – an example of how the workhorse software that helps glue organizations together can turn toxic when it is subverted by sophisticated hackers.

On Monday, SolarWinds confirmed that Orion – its flagship network management software – had served as the unwitting conduit for a sprawling international cyberespionage operation. The hackers inserted malicious code into Orion software updates pushed out to nearly 18,000 customers.

And while the number of affected organizations is thought to be much more modest, the hackers have already parlayed their access into consequential breaches at the U.S. Treasury and Department of Commerce.

[…]

Cybersecurity experts are still struggling to understand the scope of the damage.

The malicious updates – sent between March and June, when America was hunkering down to weather the first wave of coronavirus infections – was “perfect timing for a perfect storm,” said Kim Peretti, who co-chairs Atlanta-based law firm Alston & Bird’s cybersecurity preparedness and response team.

Assessing the damage would be difficult, she said.

“We may not know the true impact for many months, if not more – if not ever,” she said.

The impact on SolarWinds was more immediate. U.S. officials ordered anyone running Orion to immediately disconnect it. The company’s stock has tumbled more than 23% from $23.50 on Friday – before Reuters broke the news of the breach – to $18.06 on Tuesday.

[…]

One of those offering claimed access over the Exploit forum in 2017 was known as “fxmsp” and is wanted by the FBI “for involvement in several high-profile incidents,” said Mark Arena, chief executive of cybercrime intelligence firm Intel471. Arena informed his company’s clients, which include U.S. law enforcement agencies.

Security researcher Vinoth Kumar told Reuters that, last year, he alerted the company that anyone could access SolarWinds’ update server by using the password “solarwinds123”

[…]

Source: Hackers used SolarWinds’ dominance against it in sprawling spy campaign | Reuters

Sunday Reuters reported that “a sophisticated hacking group” backed by “a foreign government” has stolen information from America’s Treasury Department, and also from “a U.S. agency responsible for deciding policy around the internet and telecommunications.”

The Washington Post has since attributed the breach to “Russian government hackers,” and discovered it’s “part of a global espionage campaign that stretches back months, according to people familiar with the matter.” Officials were scrambling over the weekend to assess the extent of the intrusions and implement effective countermeasures, but initial signs suggested the breach was long-running and significant, the people familiar with the matter said. The Russian hackers, known by the nicknames APT29 or Cozy Bear, are part of that nation’s foreign intelligence service and breached email systems in some cases, said the people familiar with the intrusions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. The same Russian group hacked the State Department and the White House email servers during the Obama administration… [The Washington Post has also reported this is the group responsible for the FireEye breach. -Ed]

All of the organizations were breached through the update server of a network management system called SolarWinds, according to four people familiar with the matter. The company said Sunday in a statement that monitoring products it released in March and June of this year may have been surreptitiously weaponized with in a “highly-sophisticated, targeted…attack by a nation state.” The scale of the Russian espionage operation is potentially vast and appears to be large, said several individuals familiar with the matter. “This is looking very, very bad,” said one person. SolarWinds products are used by more than 300,000 organizations across the world. They include all five branches of the U.S. military, the Pentagon, State Department, Justice Department, NASA, the Executive Office of the President and the National Security Agency, the world’s top electronic spy agency, according to the firm’s website. SolarWinds is also used by the top 10 U.S. telecommunications companies…

APT29 compromised the SolarWinds server that sends updates so that any time a customer checks in to request an update, the Russians could hitch a ride on that update to get into a victim’s system, according to a person familiar with the matter. “Monday may be a bad day for lots of security teams,” tweeted Dmitri Alperovitch, a cybersecurity expert and founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank.
Reuters described the breach as “so serious it led to a National Security Council meeting at the White House.”

Source: Russia Breached Update Server Used by 300,000 Organizations, Including the NSA – Slashdot

The European Medicines Agency (EMA), the EU regulatory body in charge of approving COVID-19 vaccines, said today it was the victim of a cyber-attack.

In a short two-paragraph statement posted on its website today, the agency discloses the security breach but said it couldn’t disclose any details about the intrusion due to an ongoing investigation.

EMA is currently in the process of reviewing applications for two COVID-19 vaccines, one from US pharma giant Moderna, and a second developed in a collaboration between BioNTech and Pfizer.

[…]

in a follow-up statement released on its own website, BioNTech said that “some documents relating to the regulatory submission for Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate, BNT162b2, which has been stored on an EMA server, had been unlawfully accessed” during the attack, confirming that COVID-19 research was most likely the target of the attack.

Over the past months, numerous companies working on COVID-19 research and vaccines have been the targets of hackers, and especially of state-sponsored hacking groups.

Companies like Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, Genexine, Shin Poong Pharmaceutical, Celltrion, AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Gilead have been targeted by hackers, according to reports from Reuters and the Wall Street Journal.

In November, OS maker and cyber-security giant Microsoft said it detected three nation-state hacking groups (known as APTs) targeting seven companies working on COVID-19 vaccines, singling out Russia’s Strontium (Fancy Bear) and North Korea’s Zinc (Lazarus Group) and Cerium for the attacks.

[…]

Source: EU agency in charge of COVID-19 vaccine approval says it was hacked | ZDNet

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve seen hackers target efforts to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, but it now seems they’re shifting their attention to the supply chain that will distribute those vaccines to people across the world.

IBM says it recently uncovered a highly coordinated global phishing campaign focused on the companies and organizations involved with the upcoming “cold chain” distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. That’s the part of the supply network that ensures those vaccines stay cold enough so that they don’t go bad. It’s a critically important aspect of the two leading vaccine candidates from Pfizer and Moderna, as they need to be kept at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit and minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively.

The hackers impersonated an executive with Haier Biomedical, a Chinese company that styles itself as “the world’s only complete cold chain provider.” They sent meticulously researched phishing emails that included an HTML attachment asking the recipient to input their credentials. They could have used that information later to gain access to sensitive networks.

The campaign, which IBM says has “the potential hallmarks” of a state-sponsored effort, cast a wide net. The company only named one target explicitly — the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Taxation and Customs Union — but said the campaign targeted at least 10 different organizations, including a dev shop that makes websites for pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The company doesn’t know if any of the attacks were ultimately successful in their goal.

[…]

Source: Hackers are trying to disrupt the COVID-19 vaccine supply chain | Engadget

On Nov. 16, 2020, Virginia-based cybersecurity firm Shift5, Inc. announced that it had received a $2.6 million contract from the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) to “provide unified cybersecurity prototype kits designed to help protect the operational technology of the Army’s Stryker combat vehicle platform.” The company says it first pitched its plan for these kits at RCCTO’s first-ever Innovation Day event in September 2019.

[…]

“Adversaries demonstrated the ability to degrade select capabilities of the ICV-D when operating in a contested cyber environment,” according to an annual report from the Pentagon’s Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, or DOT&E, covering activities during the 2018 Fiscal Year. “In most cases, the exploited vulnerabilities pre-date the integration of the lethality upgrades.”

The “lethality upgrades” referred to here center on the integration of a turret armed with a 30mm automatic cannon onto the Infantry Carrier Vehicle (ICV) variant of the Stryker, resulting in the Dragoon version. The indication here is that the cyber vulnerabilities were present in systems also found on unmodified ICVs, suggesting that the issues are, or at least were, impacted other Stryker variants, as well.

Source: Army Hires Company To Develop Cyber Defenses For Its Strykers After They Were Hacked

The Information Commissioner’s Office has fined Ticketmaster £1.25m after the site’s operators failed to spot a Magecart card skimmer infection until after 9 million customers’ details had been slurped by criminals.

The breach began in February 2018 and was not detected until April, when banks realised their customers’ cards were being abused by criminals immediately after they were used for legitimate purchases on Ticketmaster’s website.

Key to the criminals’ success was Ticketmaster’s decision to deploy a Javascript-powered chatbot on its website payment pages, giving criminals an easy way in by compromising the third party’s JS – something the ICO held against Ticketmaster in its decision to award the fine.

Ticketmaster ‘fessed up to world+dog in June that year, and the final damage has now been revealed by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO): 9.4m people’s data was “potentially affected” of which 1.5m were in the UK; 66,000 credit cards were compromised and had to be replaced; and Ticketmaster itself doesn’t know how many people were affected between 25 May and 23 June 2018.

Today’s fine only applies to that May-June period, which happens to be after the Data Protection Act 2018 – the UK implementation of the EU’s GDPR – came into force. This allowed the ICO to impose a higher penalty than it could have done under the pre-GDPR legal regime.

[…]

Ticketmaster remains in denial about its culpability for the breach, telling The Register in a statement: “Ticketmaster takes fans’ data privacy and trust very seriously. Since Inbenta Technologies was breached in 2018, we have offered our full cooperation to the ICO. We plan to appeal today’s announcement.”

Inbenta Technologies supplied a custom Javascript-powered chatbot to Ticketmaster which was compromised by the Magecart operators.

Crucially, for whatever reason, Ticketmaster deployed the chatbot on its payment pages, giving the criminals a way in.

As we reported in 2018, Inbenta told us of Ticketmaster’s deployment of the Javascript in question: “Had we known that script would have been used in that way, we would have advised against it, as it poses a security threat.”

[…]

“It took Ticketmaster approximately nine weeks from the date of Monzo’s notification of possible fraud involving the Ticketmaster website for Ticketmaster to run a payment through its payment page and monitor the network traffic thereon,” said an incredulous ICO, which noted that it took a random Twitter user explaining why JS on a payments page is a bad thing for the business to wake up and do something about it.

Barclaycard and American Express also noticed suspicious goings-on in April 2018, but Ticketmaster steadfastly denied anything was wrong until May, eventually realising the game was up in June.

[…]

Source: Ticketmaster cops £1.25m ICO fine for 2018 Magecart breach, blames someone else and vows to appeal • The Register

The Campari Group recently experienced a ransomware attack that allegedly shut down the company’s servers. The malware, created by the RagnarLocker gang, essentially locked corporate servers and allowed the hackers to exfiltrate “2 terabytes” of data, according to the hackers.

On Nov. 6, the company wrote, “at this stage, we cannot completely exclude that some personal and business data has been taken.”

Clearly, it has.

While the booze company admitted to the attack, it’s clear that they haven’t get paid the ransom, as the hackers reportedly took out Facebook ads that targeted Campari Group employees on Facebook.

To post the ads, the hackers broke into a business-focused account owned by another victim, Chris Hodson, and used his credit card to pay for $500 worth of ads. Hodson, a Chicago-based DJ, told security researcher Brian Krebs he had set up two-factor authentication but that the hackers were still able to crack his Hodson Event Entertainment account.

“Hodson said a review of his account shows the unauthorized campaign reached approximately 7,150 Facebook users, and generated 770 clicks, with a cost-per-result of 21 cents,” wrote Krebs. “Of course, it didn’t cost the ransomware group anything. Hodson said Facebook billed him $35 for the first part of the campaign, but apparently detected the ads as fraudulent sometime this morning before his account could be billed another $159 for the campaign.”

[…]

Facebook isn’t the only method the Ragnar group is using to reach out to victims. Security experts believe the hacking group is also now hiring outgoing call center operators in India to help victims remember who, ultimately, is in charge of their data.

Source: Campari Ransomware Hackers Take Out Facebook Ads to Get Paid

Hackers are currently selling a trove of 3 million credit card numbers and customer records apparently stolen from Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, one of the biggest barbecue chains in the United States.

The company made a statement today about the hack, suggesting that charges made to the stolen cards will be reversed.

[…]

Security firm Gemini Advisory found the data on a hacker site called The Joker’s Stash under the name “BLAZINGSUN.” The data appears to have come from magstripe data on customer cards.

“This represents a broader challenge for the industry, and Dickey’s may become the latest cautionary tale of facing lawsuits in addition to financial damage from cybersecurity attacks,” wrote Gemini researchers.

Dickey’s experienced a ransomware attack in 2015 and recently claimed to have locked down their servers. This recent attack, however, suggests that hackers have breached a central payments service and could have even more data available for sale.

The hackers are selling the card numbers on Joker’s Stash for $17 each. Because each Dickey’s location is able to run its own point-of-sale system, it seems that this breach affected a central payments processor, allowing hackers to gain access to data from 156 of the company’s 469 locations. The hackers claim the data is “high valid,” meaning 90 to 100 percent of the cards are active and usable.

Source: Dickey’s Barbecue Pit Hackers May Have 3M Stolen Credit Cards

The scale of these data breaches now is incredible. And considering BA has been fined $26m for allowing 400,000 customer records to be stolen, I’m pretty sure Dickey’s can be glad they are not in the EU!

Barnes and Noble tonight confirmed it was hacked, and that its customers’ personal information may have been accessed by the intruders. The cyber-break-in forced the bookseller to take its systems offline this week to clean up the mess. See our update at the end of this piece. Our original report follows.

Bookseller Barnes and Noble’s computer network fell over this week, and its IT staff are having to restore servers from backups.

The effects of the collapse were first felt on Sunday, with owners of B&N’s Nook tablets discovering they were unable to download their purchased e-books to their gadgets nor buy new ones. That is to say, if they had bought an e-book and hadn’t downloaded it to their device before B&N’s cloud imploded, they would be unable to open and read the digital tome. The bookseller’s Android and Windows 10 apps were similarly affected.

It soon became clear the problem was quite serious when some cash registers in Barnes and Noble’s physical stores also briefly stopped working.

[…]

Shortly after this article was published, Barnes & Noble confirmed in an email to customers that it was hacked. The biz said it found out over the weekend, on October 10, that miscreants had broken into its computer systems, adding that customers’ personal information stored on file may have been accessed or taken by the intruders. This info includes names, addresses, telephone numbers, and purchase histories.

Source: Confirmed: Barnes & Noble hacked, systems taken offline for days, miscreants may have swiped personal info • The Register

German authorities said Thursday that what appears to have been a misdirected hacker attack caused the failure of IT systems at a major hospital in Duesseldorf, and a woman who needed urgent admission died after she had to be taken to another city for treatment.

The Duesseldorf University Clinic’s systems have been disrupted since last Thursday. The hospital said investigators have found that the source of the problem was a hacker attack on a weak spot in “widely used commercial add-on software,” which it didn’t identify.

As a consequence, systems gradually crashed and the hospital wasn’t able to access data; emergency patients were taken elsewhere and operations postponed.

The hospital said that that “there was no concrete ransom demand.” It added that there are no indications that data is irretrievably lost and that its IT systems are being gradually restarted.

A report from North Rhine-Westphalia state’s justice minister said that 30 servers at the hospital were encrypted last week and an extortion note left on one of the servers, news agency dpa reported. The note — which called on the addressees to get in touch, but didn’t name any sum — was addressed to the Heinrich Heine University, to which the Duesseldorf hospital is affiliated, and not to the hospital itself.

Duesseldorf police then established contact and told the perpetrators that the hospital, and not the university, had been affected, endangering patients. The perpetrators then withdrew the extortion attempt and provided a digital key to decrypt the data. The perpetrators are no longer reachable, according to the justice minister’s report.

Prosecutors launched an investigation against the unknown perpetrators on suspicion of negligent manslaughter because a patient in a life-threatening condition who was supposed to be taken to the hospital last Friday night was sent instead to a hospital in Wuppertal, a roughly 32-kilometer (20-mile) drive. Doctors weren’t able to start treating her for an hour and she died.

Source: German Hospital Hacked, Patient Taken to Another City Dies | SecurityWeek.Com

EMV is the international protocol standard for smartcard payment and is used in over 9 billion cards worldwide. Despite the standard’s advertised security, various issues have been previously uncovered, deriving from logical flaws that are hard to spot in EMV’s lengthy and complex specification, running over 2,000 pages. We formalize a comprehensive symbolic model of EMV in Tamarin, a state-of-the-art protocol verifier. Our model is the first that supports a fine-grained analysis of all relevant security guarantees that EMV is intended to offer. We use our model to automatically identify flaws that lead to two critical attacks: one that defrauds the cardholder and another that defrauds the merchant. First, criminals can use a victim’s Visa contactless card for high-value purchases, without knowledge of the card’s PIN. We built a proof-of-concept Android application and successfully demonstrated this attack on real-world payment terminals. Second, criminals can trick the terminal into accepting an unauthentic offline transaction, which the issuing bank should later decline, after the criminal has walked away with the goods. This attack is possible for implementations following the standard, although we did not test it on actual terminals for ethical reasons. Finally, we propose and verify improvements to the standard that prevent these attacks, as well as any other attacks that violate the considered security properties. The proposed improvements can be easily implemented in the terminals and do not affect the cards in circulation.

Source: [2006.08249] The EMV Standard: Break, Fix, Verify

[…]

Flight Radar spokesman Ian Petchenik told The Register: “At this time we understand this to be a very strong DDoS attack [orchestrated] from a single source. While it is not known why we’re being targeted, multiple flight tracking services have suffered attacks over the past two days.”

It was not immediately obvious which other sites had suffered attacks, though some had used their Twitter accounts to inform followers of planned server upgrades and updates to end-user apps.

Open source researchers claim to have picked up the live flight tracks of drones over Armenia and Azerbaijan, following armed skirmishes between the two nations over the long-disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. The conflict gained a more international dimension earlier today when a Turkish F-16 fighter jet reportedly shot down an elderly Armenian Su-25 Frogfoot ground attack aircraft.

Another day, another #drone.

Turkish drone carrying out surveillance flights over Iraqi Kurdistan in areas with PKK activities. pic.twitter.com/AOMLXXqjVl

— Wim Zwijnenburg (@wammezz) September 25, 2020

The use of DDoSes against general-interest websites has fallen out of favour in recent years as the script kiddies behind those types of attacks in days of yore a) grew up and b) realised that ransomware is far more lucrative than crayoning over someone else’s website.

With that said, such attacks are still in use: in August someone malicious forced the New Zealand stock exchange offline, while encrypted email biz Tutanota suffered a spate of similar attacks earlier this month.

Whatever the cause of the Flight Radar 24 attacks – one knowledgeable source suggested to El Reg that the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict may have triggered a government determined to control what the wider world can see – they serve as a reminder that even one of the oldest online attack methods can still cause chaos today.

Source: Plane-tracking site Flight Radar 24 DDoSed… just as drones spotted buzzing over Azerbaijan and Armenia • The Register

Would you believe more than 1% of computers worldwide are still using Windows XP? Incredibly, there are still millions of people using 19-year-old operating system. And a recent development — if it bears out — is another reason  people need to make the switch to something newer.

On Thursday, users on 4chan posted what they claimed was the source code of Windows XP.

Posting an image of a screenshot allegedly of the source code in front of Window’s XP iconic Bliss background, one user wrote ‘sooooo Windows XP Source code leaked’. Another Redditor helpfully has uploaded the code as a torrent, assisting in its spread.

While there is no confirmation that this code is definitely Windows XP, independent researchers have begun to pick through the source code and believe it stands up to scrutiny.

[…]

 

Source: Looks Like the Windows XP Source Code Just Leaked on 4chan

Iranian hackers, most likely employees or affiliates of the government, have been running a vast cyberespionage operation equipped with surveillance tools that can outsmart encrypted messaging systems — a capability Iran was not previously known to possess, according to two digital security reports released Friday.

The operation not only targets domestic dissidents, religious and ethnic minorities and antigovernment activists abroad, but can also be used to spy on the general public inside Iran, said the reports by Check Point Software Technologies, a cybersecurity technology firm, and the Miaan Group, a human rights organization that focuses on digital security in the Middle East.

The reports, which were reviewed by The New York Times in advance of their release, say that the hackers have successfully infiltrated what were thought to be secure mobile phones and computers belonging to the targets, overcoming obstacles created by encrypted applications such as Telegram and, according to Miaan, even gaining access to information on WhatsApp. Both are popular messaging tools in Iran. The hackers also have created malware disguised as Android applications, the reports said.

[…]

According to the report by Check Point’s intelligence unit, the cyberespionage operation was set up in 2014, and its full range of capabilities went undetected for six years.

[…]

The hackers appeared to have a clear goal: stealing information about Iranian opposition groups in Europe and the United States and spying on Iranians who often use mobile applications to plan protests, according to the Miaan report.

Among the most prominent victims of the attacks, the reports said, are the Mujahedeen Khalq, or M.E.K., an insurgent group that the Iranian authorities regard as a terrorist organization; a group known as the Association of Families of Camp Ashraf and Liberty Residents; the Azerbaijan National Resistance organization; citizens of Iran’s restive Sistan and Balochistan Province; and Hrana, an Iranian human rights news agency. Human rights lawyers and journalists working for Voice of America have also been targeted, Miaan said.

According to Check Point, the hackers use a variety of infiltration techniques, including phishing, but the most widespread method is sending what appear to be tempting documents and applications to carefully selected targets.

[…]

These documents contained malware code that activated a number of spyware commands from an external server when the recipients opened them on their desktops or phones. According to the Check Point report, almost all of the targets have been organizations and opponents of the government who have left Iran and are now based in Europe. Miaan documented targets in the United States, Canada and Turkey as well as the European Union.

The spyware enabled the attackers to gain access to almost any file, log clipboard data, take screenshots and steal information. According to Miaan, one application empowered hackers to download data stored on WhatsApp.

In addition, the attackers discovered a weakness in the installation protocols of several encrypted applications including Telegram, which had always been deemed relatively secure, enabling them to steal the apps’ installation files.

These files, in turn, allow the attackers to make full use of the victims’ Telegram accounts. Although the attackers cannot decipher the encrypted communications of Telegram, their strategy makes it unnecessary. Rather, they use the stolen installation files to create Telegram logins to activate the app in the victims’ names on another device. This enables the attackers to secretly monitor all Telegram activity of the victims.

“This cutting-edge surveillance operation succeeded in going under the radar for at least six years,” said Lotem Finkelstein, head of threat intelligence at Check Point. “The group maintained a multi-platform, targeted attack, with both mobile, desktop and web attack vectors, that left no evasion path for victims on the target list.”

[…]

Source: Iranian Hackers Can Beat Encrypted Apps like Telegram, Researchers Say – The New York Times

The malware that French law enforcement deployed en masse onto Encrochat devices, a large encrypted phone network using Android phones, had the capability to harvest “all data stored within the device,” and was expected to include chat messages, geolocation data, usernames, passwords, and more, according to a document obtained by Motherboard.

The document adds more specifics around the law enforcement hack and subsequent takedown of Encrochat earlier this year. Organized crime groups across Europe and the rest of the world heavily used the network before its seizure, in many cases to facilitate large scale drug trafficking. The operation is one of, if not the, largest law enforcement mass hacking operation to date, with investigators obtaining more than a hundred million encrypted messages.

“The NCA has been collaborating with the Gendarmerie on Encrochat for over 18 months, as the servers are hosted in France. The ultimate objective of this collaboration has been to identify and exploit any vulnerability in the service to obtain content,” the document reads, referring to both the UK’s National Crime Agency and one of the national police forces of France.

As well as the geolocation, chat messages, and passwords, the law enforcement malware also told infected Encrochat devices to provide a list of WiFi access points near the device, the document reads.

[…]

Encrochat was a company that offered custom-built phones that sent end-to-end encrypted messages to one another. Encrochat took a base Android device, installed its own software, and physically removed the GPS, microphone, and camera functionality to lock down the devices further. These modifications may have impacted what sort of data the malware was actually able to obtain once deployed. Encrochat phones had a panic wipe feature, where if a user entered a particular PIN it would erase data stored on the device. The devices also ran two operating systems that sat side by side; one that appeared to be innocuous, and another that contained the users’ more sensitive communications.

In a previous email to Motherboard a representative of Encrochat said the firm is a legitimate company with clients in 140 countries, and that it sets out “to find the best technology on the market to provide a reliable and secure service for any organization or individual that want[s] to secure their information.” The firm had tens of thousands of users worldwide, and decided to shut itself down after discovering the hack against its network.

Encrochat’s customers included a British hitman who assassinated a crime leader and an armed robber, and various violent gangs around Europe including those who used so-called “torture chambers.” Some of the users may have been legitimate, however.

Since the shutdown, police across Europe have arrested hundreds of alleged criminals who used the service. Motherboard previously obtained chat logs that prosecutors have presented as evidence against one drug dealer.

Running an encrypted phone company is not typically illegal in-and-of-itself. The U.S. Department of Justice charged Vince Ramos, the CEO of another firm called Phantom Secure with racketeering conspiracy and other charges after an undercover investigation caught him saying the phones were made for drug trafficking. Phantom Secure started as a legitimate firm before catering more to the criminal market. Ramos was sentenced to nine years in prison in May 2019.

Source: European Police Malware Could Harvest GPS, Messages, Passwords, More

How they harvested GPS from devices with the functionality physically removed is a mystery to me, although wifi networks definitely provide a pretty good form of geolocation

More than a dozen internet service providers (ISPs) across Europe have reported DDoS attacks that targeted their DNS infrastructure.

The list of ISPs that suffered attacks over the past week includes Belgium’s EDP, France’s Bouygues Télécom, FDN, K-net, SFR, and the Netherlands’ Caiway, Delta, FreedomNet, Online.nl, Signet, and Tweak.nl.

Attacks lasted no longer than a day and were all eventually mitigated, but ISP services were down while the DDoS was active.

NBIP, a non-profit founded by Dutch ISPs to collectively fight DDoS attacks and government wiretapping attempts, provided ZDNet with additional insights into the past week’s incidents.

“Multiple attacks were aimed towards routers and DNS infrastructure of Benelux based ISPs,” a spokesperson said. “Most of [the attacks] were DNS amplification and LDAP-type of attacks.”

“Some of the attacks took longer than 4 hours and hit close to 300Gbit/s in volume,” NBIB said.

[…]

Source: European ISPs report mysterious wave of DDoS attacks | ZDNet