Author Archives: Patrick Howell O'Neill

$365,000 dark net phishing scam leads to guilty plea from U.S. hacker

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A Connecticut man pleaded guilty to charges of phishing against criminal dark web markets in a scheme that eventually obtained over $365,000 and more than 10,000 stolen user credentials. Michael Richo, 35 of Connecticut, pleaded guilty on Tuesday in Hartford federal court to hacking and money laundering offenses. Richo’s scheme is familiar to any dark net denizen: In forums on the dark net, he posted fake links to dark net markets where illicit goods and services are on sale. He built fake login pages to fool victims and steal their credentials. Richo then monitored the compromised accounts and withdrew any bitcoin deposited into them before it could be spent. It ended up being deposited in his own bitcoin wallet. “Richo then sold the stolen bitcoins to others in exchange for U.S. currency, which was deposited into bank accounts that RICHO controlled or was provided to him through Green Dot Cards, Western Union transfers, and MoneyGram […]

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Ukrainian officials: Hacked auto-updates spread ransomware infection across country

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As the whole world deals with another massive ransomware outbreak, it appears the variant may have spread in different ways among the various impacted countries. In Ukraine, the hardest hit nation in Tuesday’s outbreak, the ransomware spread across government institutions, banks and even radiation monitoring at the Chernobyl nuclear facility. The initial attack vector has been attributed to an update of accounting software company MeDoc, which sent an infected file out to customers, according to Ukrainian officials as well as security researchers at Kaspersky and Cisco. MeDoc acknowledged Tuesday afternoon the company was targeted by “a massive hacker attack,” but denied that the software updates were the infection vector that allowed the malware to spread across the country. The company did not respond to a request for comment. Aleks Gostev, Kaspersky Lab’s Chief Security Expert, wrote sardonically on Twitter that MeDoc’s response was merely the first stage of grief: “Denial.” Кіберполіцією попередньо установлено, що перші вірусні атаки на […]

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94 percent of Forbes 2000 companies have no bug bounty programs, report says

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Bug bounty programs are paying more than ever, but they’re still absent from most of the world’s top 2,000 public companies, according to a new report Tuesday from HackerOne. The San Francisco-based company, which sells its own bug bounty platform, says 94 percent of companies on the Forbes Global 2000 have no discernible way to receive reports about vulnerabilities in their networks. That number is unchanged from HackerOne’s 2015 security report. The companies that do have bug bounty programs, however, are willing to pay more for vulnerability disclosures, HackerOne says. The average bounty on the company’s platform had grown 16 percent in two years to a current average of $1,923. HackerOne itself recently raised a $40 million investment and assisted the Pentagon with bug bounty programs. The security report notes that in addition to the Department of Defense, the Food and Drug Administration, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, National Institute of Standards […]

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New cybersecurity partnership makes it easier for Israeli companies to sell to U.S. authorities

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The United States and Israel unveiled a new cybersecurity partnership on Monday aimed at “stopping adversaries in networks and identifying ways to hold bad actors responsible,” according to White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert. Bossert announced the “Israeli-U.S. bilateral cyber working group” at the opening of the Cyber Week 2017 conference in Tel Aviv. The group, which will meet this week, will be led by Rob Joyce, the White House’s cybersecurity coordinator, and Eviatar Matania, the director general of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate. Members will include an unspecified number of representatives from across the U.S. and Israeli military, criminal justice and foreign relations establishments. Joyce previously ran the U.S. National Security Agency’s Tailored Access Operations (NSA TAO), the spy agency’s offensive division. Matania has helped shape Israeli cybersecurity policy for the past several years but has a private sector pedigree that includes tech and venture capital. “The meetings this week will focus on a […]

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Encryption debate is a top focus at Five Eyes meeting

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As the Five Eyes intelligence alliance meets in Ottawa this week, Australian officials are heading to Canada with encryption as a top priority. Australia’s attorney general, George Brandis, published a memo this weekend detailing a plan to seek greater legal powers against encrypted data in the meeting with representatives of the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. “As Australia’s priority issue, I will raise the need to address ongoing challenges posed by terrorists and criminals using encryption,” Brandis, who also serves in Australia’s Senate, said in a statement. “These discussions will focus on the need to cooperate with service providers to ensure reasonable assistance is provided to law enforcement and security agencies.” Some of the biggest tech companies in the world, including Apple and Facebook, have adopted strong encryption for their products. The mainstreaming of encryption helped spark an international debate — famously referred to as the […]

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Anthem will pay $115 million in largest data breach settlement in history

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Anthem Inc. agreed to pay $115 million in a deal to end a court battle over the 2015 data breach where hackers gained access to sensitive records for nearly 80 million Americans. The funds will go toward credit monitoring and reimbursement for customers, in addition to as much as $38 million in attorneys’ fees. The 2015 breach saw hackers access records including Social Security numbers, birthdays, addresses, detailed employment information and income data. Chinese state-sponsored attackers were suspected in the attack but there has been no official attribution. The settlement requires Anthem to guarantee “a certain level of funding for information security and to implement or maintain numerous specific changes to its data security systems, including encryption of certain information and archiving sensitive data with strict access controls,” according to a statement by the plaintiffs’ attorneys. “The settlement is designed to protect class members from future risk, provide compensation, and ensure best cybersecurity practices to […]

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Cisco aims to detect malware hidden in encrypted traffic

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Cisco Systems unveiled a new subscription service this week it says detects signs of malware inside encrypted traffic with 99.9 percent efficacy. It’s a big unveil for Cisco, whose CEO Chuck Robbins said the project has been in the works in 75 field trials, including NASA, for two years — exactly the amount of time Robbins has been at the helm — and now offers something no other company can. Half of all web traffic is encrypted as of February 2017 and that number, for enterprise web traffic, is set to rise to over 80 percent by 2019, according to Gartner. The new product, called Encrypted Traffic Analytics (ETA), was outlined in a 2016 research paper by Blake Anderson, a technical leader at Cisco, and David McGrew, a Fellow in the company’s Advanced Security Research Group. ETA is meant to catapult the software and subscription side of Cisco’s business, Robbins said in an interview with CNBC, […]

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State election officials resisted federal cybersecurity assistance during 2016 election

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State and local election authorities resisted federal cybersecurity assistance during 2016, President Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary told lawmakers Wednesday. As attacks against election targets because increasingly visible in 2016, Jeh Johnson, who was secretary into early 2017, floated the idea of designating election infrastructure as critical infrastructure, making it a top security priority for DHS and give it the benefit of domestic and international cybersecurity protections. “To my disappointment, the reaction to a critical infrastructure designation, at least from those who spoke up, ranged from neutral to negative,” Johnson said. ” Those who expressed negative views stated that running elections in this country was the sovereign and exclusive responsibility of the states, and they did not want federal intrusion, a federal takeover, or federal regulation of that process. This was a profound misunderstanding of what a critical infrastructure designation would mean, which I tried to clarify for them.” A a critical infrastructure designation […]

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The curious case of the missing Mt. Gox bitcoin fortune

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Did you lose a bunch of bitcoin from Mt. Gox? The “destination” of the digital currency from bitcoin’s most infamous theft is “definitely” known — but the finders won’t say where those coins are currently located. Mt. Gox, the largest bitcoin exchange at the time of its headline-grabbing demise, declared bankruptcy after the theft or disappearance of 850,000 bitcoins valued at $450 million in February 2014, along with $27 million in cash. Although 200,000 were eventually found, the location of the remaining 650,000 remained unknown and the subject of much speculation over the last three years. It turns out that Chainalysis, the investigator for Mt. Gox’s creditors, “definitely” knows where the coins are sitting right now, according to congressional testimony by the firm’s co-founder. Due to the surge in the cryptocurrency’s value since Mt. Gox went down, the 650,000 missing bitcoins are currently worth nearly $2 billion. The legal battles over the missing coins temporarily landed the CEO of […]

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Top Democrat wants ‘full scope’ of foreign hacking against election systems publicly disclosed

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Mark Warner, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, wants the Department of Homeland Security to publicly disclose “the full scope” of foreign hacking of state and local election systems, the Virginian wrote in a letter today to DHS Secretary John Kelly. The Intelligence panel will hold an open hearing Wednesday on Russian hacking against U.S. targets. Experts from the DHS, FBI, Illinois State Board of Elections, the National Association of State Election Directors and election cybersecurity expert J. Alex Halderman will testify. “While I am not aware of evidence that the 2016 voting process itself was subjected to manipulation, and have no reason to doubt the validity of the election results, we know that the DHS and FBI have confirmed two intrusions into voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois by foreign-based hackers, though no data was modified or deleted.” Warner wrote in a letter to Kelly. “At the same time, there was suspicious activity aimed […]

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