At least tens of thousands, if not millions of medical records of New York patients were until recently readily accessible online to just about anyone who knew how to look.

Patient demographic information, social security numbers, records of medical diagnoses and treatments, along with a plethora of other highly-sensitive records were left completely undefended by a medical IT company based in Louisville, Kentucky. The files, which belong to at least tens of thousands of patients, originate from Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center in New York.

In a statement provided to Gizmodo—and published by NBC News Wednesday night—Bronx Lebanon said that a server containing its patients’ data had been the “target of an unauthorized hack by a third party,” attributing that assessment to the hospital’s vendor, iHealth Solutions. The hospital added that iHealth had taken immediate steps to protect the data, and that both parties were “cooperating fully with law enforcement agents.” iHealth Solutions did not respond to request for comment.

However, according to Kromtech Security Center, a German security software development firm, the leak was not the result of a malicious hacker infiltrating the Bronx Lebanon server. Instead, the firm’s analysis showed that the data was left unprotected on a backup storage device, without a password, accessible to anyone online. It also appears likely that the data was not protected by an active firewall, exposing an untold number of patients to crimes such identity theft and blackmail.
[…]
In March, Kromtech reported that more than 400,000 audio recordings of telemarketing calls had been exposed online, including many in which customers provided sensitive information, such as credit card details. A month before, the researchers helped secure the personal data of nearly 25,000 California sheet metal workers. Before that, it was a Missouri sheriff’s office, which had inadvertently leaked audio recordings of police informants of victims involved in crimes as serious as child molestation.

Source: Huge Trove of Confidential Medical Records Discovered on Unsecured Server Accessible to Anyone

Secure rsync, people!

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“An ‘accidental hero’ has halted the global spread of the WannaCry ransomware that has wreaked havoc on organizations…” writes The Guardian. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
A cybersecurity researcher tweeting as @malwaretechblog, with the help of Darien Huss from security firm Proofpoint, found and implemented a “kill switch” in the malicious software that was based on a cyber-weapon stolen from the NSA. The kill switch was hardcoded into the malware in case the creator wanted to stop it from spreading. This involved a very long nonsensical domain name that the malware makes a request to — just as if it was looking up any website — and if the request comes back and shows that the domain is live, the kill switch takes effect and the malware stops spreading. Of course, this relies on the creator of the malware registering the specific domain. In this case, the creator failed to do this. And @malwaretechblog did early Friday morning (Pacific Time), stopping the rapid proliferation of the ransomware.

You can read their first-person account of the discovery here, which insists that registering the domain “was not a whim. My job is to look for ways we can track and potentially stop botnets…” Friday they also tweeted a map from the New York Times showing that registering that domain provided more time for U.S. sites to patch their systems. And Friday night they added “IP addresses from our [DNS] sinkhole have been sent to FBI and ShadowServer so affected organizations should get a notification soon. Patch ASAP.”

UPDATE: Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein says some antivirus services (and firewalls incorporating their rules) are mistakenly blocking that site as a ‘bad domain’, which allows the malware to continue spreading. “Your systems MUST be able to access the domain above if this malware blocking trigger is to be effective, according to the current reports that I’m receiving!”

slashdot

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The audio driver installed on some HP laptops includes a feature that could best be described as a keylogger, which records all the user’s keystrokes and saves the information to a local file, accessible to anyone or any third-party software or malware that knows where to look.

Swiss cyber-security firm modzero discovered the keylogger on April 28 and made its findings public today.
Keylogger found in preinstalled audio driver

According to researchers, the keylogger feature was discovered in the Conexant HD Audio Driver Package version 1.0.0.46 and earlier.

This is an audio driver that is preinstalled on HP laptops. One of the files of this audio driver is MicTray64.exe (C:\windows\system32\mictray64.exe).

This file is registered to start via a Scheduled Task every time the user logs into his computer. According to modzero researchers, the file “monitors all keystrokes made by the user to capture and react to functions such as microphone mute/unmute keys/hotkeys.”

This behavior, by itself, is not a problem, as many other apps work this way. The problem is that this file writes all keystrokes to a local file at:

C:\users\public\MicTray.log

Audio driver also exposes keystrokes in real-time via local API

If the file doesn’t exist or a registry key containing this file’s path does not exist or was corrupted, the audio driver will pass all keystrokes to a local API, named the OutputDebugString API.

Source: Keylogger Found in Audio Driver of HP Laptops

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“Non tech savvy users will have issues reporting or getting the problem fixed,” he explained. “To regain web access you have to disable Web Shield or disable Avast or uninstall Avast. To fix the issue you have to do a clean install of the latest version of software.”

It’s unclear how widespread the problem is. Avast’s PR reps have acknowledged our requests for comment but are yet to supply a substantive response.

All HTTP requests are blocked from all applications including Windows Update. “TCP connections are established but no HTTP request is sent,” according to Michael S.

Source: Avast blocks the entire internet – again

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Emmanuel Macron’s digital team responded to cyberattacks with a “cyber-blurring” strategy that involved fake email accounts loaded with false documents.
[…]
“We created false accounts, with false content, as traps. We did this massively, to create the obligation for them to verify, to determine whether it was a real account,” Mr. Mahjoubi said. “I don’t think we prevented them. We just slowed them down,” he said. “Even if it made them lose one minute, we’re happy,” he said.
[…]
But he did note that in the mishmash that constituted the Friday dump, there were some authentic documents, some phony documents of the hackers’ own manufacture, some stolen documents from various companies, and some false emails created by the campaign.

Source: Hackers Came, but the French Were Prepared

What this does – which is more important – is it puts the onus on the leakers / hackers to verify the contents of their data, which is a big deal, as this is hard to do and time consuming. As soon as any doubt is seeded on the authenticity on even one of the documents in a leaked trove, the whole of the trove massively loses value.

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TITSUP: Total Inability To Stand Up Products

Loads of people reported that, at around 1245 PT, access to the service went out. Microsoft confirmed shortly after it was having problems, and said it was looking into the matter. Subscribers in New York, Denver, Texas, and Portland, in the US, were, for example, unable to access the service.

We are investigating a problem affecting access to Office 365, and we will post an update as soon as we have more info.
— Office 365 Status (@Office365Status) May 10, 2017

Monitoring site Downdetector was crammed with reports of outages from both coasts of the US and major cities as users reported the cloud-connected Office service to be inaccessible.
[…]
we notice they tweeted that as of 1338 PT, sign-in issues are being resolved

Source: Well this is awkward. As Microsoft was bragging about Office at Build, Office 365 went down

The problem with the Cloud

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Malware has infected backend systems used by Brit high street chain Debenhams – and swiped 26,000 people’s personal information in the process.

The cyber-break-in targeted the online portal for the retailer’s florist arm, Debenhams Flowers. Miscreants had access to the internal systems at Ecomnova, the biz that runs the Debenhams Flowers business, for more than six weeks.

Customer payment details, names and addresses from between February 24 and April 11 were all potentially exposed as a result of the breach, reports ex-Register vulture Alex J Martin, who just flew off to Sky News. Affected customers have all reportedly been notified.

El Reg asked Debenhams for confirmation of the scope of the breach but we’re yet to hear back at the time of writing.

Security tech slingers said the snafu shows how brands can be exposed through the infosec shortcomings of third-party suppliers.

“The hackers allegedly gained access to site operator Economova’s systems using malicious software to access customers’ personal and financial information,” said Dr Jamie Graves, chief exec at ZoneFox. “The Debenhams hack is a key reminder to businesses that the third-party vendors you partner should be properly vetted to ensure they have secure systems in place.”

Source: Debenhams Flowers shoppers stung by bank card-stealing tech pest

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A remote hijacking flaw that lurked in Intel chips for seven years was more severe than many people imagined, because it allowed hackers to remotely gain administrative control over huge fleets of computers without entering a password. This is according to technical analyses published Friday… AMT makes it possible to log into a computer and exercise the same control enjoyed by administrators with physical access [and] was set up to require a password before it could be remotely accessed over a Web browser interface. But, remarkably, that authentication mechanism can be bypassed by entering any text string — or no text at all…

“Authentication still worked” even when the wrong hash was entered, Tenable Director of Reverse Engineering Carlos Perez wrote. “We had discovered a complete bypass of the authentication scheme.” A separate technical analysis from Embedi, the security firm Intel credited with first disclosing the vulnerability, arrived at the same conclusion… Making matters worse, unauthorized accesses typically aren’t logged by the PC because AMT has direct access to the computer’s network hardware… The packets bypass the OS completely.

Slashdot

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WikiLeaks isn’t done exposing the CIA’s arsenal of hacking tools used to infiltrate computer systems around the globe. Last month, we told you about Weeping Angel, which targeted select Samsung Smart TVs for surveillance purposes. Today, we’re learning about Archimedes, which attacks computers attached to a Local Area Network (LAN).

Although we have no way of knowing whether Archimedes is still in use by the CIA, the details of how it is unleashed on unsuspecting parties has been revealed in full. In its teaser announcing the exploit, WikiLeaks writes, “It allows the re-directing of traffic from the target computer inside the LAN through a computer infected with this malware and controlled by the CIA.
[…]
Fulcrum uses ARP spoofing to get in the middle of the target machine and the default gateway on the LAN so that it can monitor all traffic leaving the target machine. It is important to note that Fulcrum only establishes itself in the middle on one side of the two­-way communication channel between the target machine and the default gateway. Once Fulcrum is in the middle, it forwards all requests from the target machine to the real gateway.

Archimedes can be deployed on machines running Windows XP (32-bit), Windows Vista (64-bit) and Windows 7 (64-bit) operating systems. The CIA documentation also says that the binaries required for Archimedes/Fulcrum will “run on any reasonably modern x86-compatible hardware”.

Source: WikiLeaks Reveals CIA Man-in-the-Middle LAN Hacking Tool Archimedes

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Experts have been warning for years about security blunders in the Signaling System 7 protocol – the magic glue used by cellphone networks to communicate with each other.

These shortcomings can be potentially abused to, for example, redirect people’s calls and text messages to miscreants’ devices. Now we’ve seen the first case of crooks exploiting the design flaws to line their pockets with victims’ cash.

O2-Telefonica in Germany has confirmed to Süddeutsche Zeitung that some of its customers have had their bank accounts drained using a two-stage attack that exploits SS7.

In other words, thieves exploited SS7 to intercept two-factor authentication codes sent to online banking customers, allowing them to empty their accounts. The thefts occurred over the past few months, according to multiple sources.

Source: After years of warnings, mobile network hackers exploit SS7 flaws to drain bank accounts

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