Author Archives: Tim Starks

Supreme Court considers scope of federal anti-hacking law in biggest cyber case to date

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Several U.S. Supreme Court justices, including some of President Donald Trump’s appointees, skeptically questioned a broad interpretation of the main federal anti-hacking law during oral arguments Monday. The hearing represented one of the final steps in the biggest case to come before the nation’s highest court involving the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), written in the 1980s. The case centers on when an individual “exceeds authorized access” to a computer, as defined by that law. The law has long held a contentious place in the cybersecurity world, where it’s viewed as hopelessly vague, outdated and overly punitive. One CFAA prosecution that drew particular criticism was that of Aaron Swartz, an internet activist who took his own life before he was scheduled to stand trial for allegedly downloading articles from an academic database, in a case where he faced decades in prison if convicted. The case now before the Supreme Court involves defendant Nathan […]

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It’s hard to keep a big botnet down: TrickBot sputters back toward full health

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Mounting evidence suggests that TrickBot, the vast botnet that both U.S. Cyber Command and a Microsoft-led coalition sought to disable around the 2020 elections, is on the mend and evolving. The separate campaigns featured Microsoft going to court to disable IP addresses associated with TrickBot command and control servers, as Cyber Command’s operation also targeted command and control servers.  Hints of its rebound began in late October, shortly after signs of success in the bids to dismantle the TrickBot network of zombie computers. While Cyber Command and Microsoft always billed their assaults as a disruption rather than a full takedown, the TrickBot comeback is proof that it’s difficult to kill a botnet outright. Botnets are dangerous because they can be used to conduct a range of harmful activities, like distributed denial of service attacks that overwhelm a site with traffic or ransomware attacks, the latter of which were a major issue of concern for U.S. national security […]

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Accused email scammers busted in Nigeria for alleged fraud against 50,000 victims

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An Interpol-helmed operation led to the arrest of three suspected cybercriminal gang members in Nigeria whose outfit has allegedly targeted victims in more than 150 countries, including schemes that involved offering COVID-19 aid. The sting, announced Wednesday, was part of Operation Falcon, a year-long investigation that teamed with cybersecurity company Group-IB and the Nigeria Police Force. “This group was running a well-established criminal business model,” said Craig Jones, Interpol’s cybercrime director. “From infiltration to cashing in, they used a multitude of tools and techniques to generate maximum profits.” The gang, dubbed TMT, is divided into numerous subgroups, according to Vesta Matveeva, head of Group-IB’s APAC Cyber Investigations Team. The three suspects arrested in Lagos tallied 50,000 victims in government and industry, the company said. Matveeva said via email that TMT overall might have compromised more than 500,000 victims since 2017. TMT’s speciality is business email compromise (BEC), where the attackers pose […]

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Home Depot to pay states $17.5 million over massive 2014 data breach

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U.S. states have reached a settlement over the mammoth 2014 Home Depot breach that will net them $17.5 million, plus an agreement from the home improvement retailer to strengthen its data security practices. The breach, which compromised 56 million payment card across the U.S., still ranks among the biggest data breaches ever. It’s been an expensive cleanup. Years after the attack, Home Depot estimated the cost at about $179 million and said it was likely to continue growing. The settlement with 46 states and the District of Columbia adds to the tally. It also comes one month after Home Depot suffered a data breach of its Canadian customers that was much smaller than the 2014 breach that was the subject of the U.S. settlement. “Instead of building a secure system, The Home Depot failed to protect consumers and put their data at risk,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said about the 2014 incident. […]

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After years of work, Congress passes ‘internet of things’ cybersecurity bill — and it’s kind of a big deal

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Congress last week did something that it rarely does: It passed a meaningful cybersecurity bill. The legislation is aimed at enhancing the safeguards of internet-connected devices — also known as the internet of things (IoT) — such as smart sensors that monitor water quality or control ships in waterway locks. The bill is also a major step toward the federal government encouraging vulnerability disclosure policies that implement programs for organizations to work with security researchers to fix software flaws. “It is arguably the most significant U.S. IoT-specific cybersecurity law to date, as well as the most significant law promoting coordinated vulnerability disclosure in the private sector to date,” said Harley Geiger, director of public policy at Rapid7, a cybersecurity company. All it took to get across the finish line was more than three years of bipartisan work, encroaching state and foreign government IoT rules, a ticking legislative clock, goodwill toward […]

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Ghost in the machine: Researchers find Webex vulnerabilities allow hidden visitors

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Halloween may have been last month, but IBM researchers revealed Wednesday that they discovered a way ghosts could haunt Cisco Webex meetings. The vulnerabilities in the video conferencing platform — since the subject of a Cisco patch — would permit uninvited guests to join a meeting without showing up on the participant list, stay in a meeting even after the host expels them and gather information about other attendees without joining. Unwelcome guests are often more commonly associated with a Webex competitor, Zoom, which led to the coining of the term “Zoombombing” and Zoom wrestling with the problem. But the IBM research shows that with so many meetings happening online during the pandemic, Zoom isn’t alone. Webex registered a record 324 million users in March, and saw usage grow 451% from mid-February to mid-June. IBM Research found that invaders could exploit the “handshake” process whereby Webex connects meeting participants. “A malicious actor […]

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Financial system not keeping up with cyberthreats, new report says

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Four years after the biggest bank hack ever, the global financial system remains vulnerable to cyberattacks that could cause severe disruptions, according to a report Wednesday that draws advice from government officials, the financial industry and other experts. The assessment from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Word Economic Forum is the culmination of years of work, with touchstones ranging from the 2016 Bangladesh Bank heist where hackers made off with $81 million to a recent Chilean bank ransomware attack that shut down all of its branches. “Our big concern is that if you look at what’s happened during the pandemic, but even before with the escalating threat that’s targeting the financial system from the Bangladesh incident to the Chile outage back in September, we’re clearly not keeping up with the threat and how quickly it’s evolving,” said Tim Maurer, director of Carnegie’s Cyber Policy Initiative. “The government and industry need […]

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Zoom pushes new tools meant to counter ‘Zoombombing’

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Zoom on Monday unveiled a trio of security tools the video conferencing company and its users can deploy to defend against unwelcome intruders who “Zoombomb” meetings. The announcement is the latest in a blitz that began this spring, when Zoom’s daily usage skyrocket at the onset of the coronavirus outbreak, and the company admitted it was caught off guard by the resulting security woes — among them, uninvited users posting offensive materials. Last week, Zoom reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over its encryption claims. The company has since begun rolling out end-to-end encryption for all users. Multiple state attorneys general also had pressed Zoom to do more about Zoombombing. The company reached an agreement with New York in May to increase security. “Suspend Participant Activities,” one of the three tools Zoom detailed in a blog post, allows Zoom hosts to pause meeting functions to report disruptive attendees. Afterward, the host can resume video, audio, screen sharing and other […]

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TikTok gets extensions on US sale order, ban enforcement

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The Trump administration is giving Beijing-based ByteDance 15 more days to divest in popular video-sharing app TikTok, the Treasury Department said Friday. The Treasury Department statement is the second executive branch reprieve in as many days for TikTok, which the Trump administration has sought to ban in the United States. The Commerce Department also said Thursday that it wouldn’t start enforcing a TikTok ban as a court battle continues. The Trump administration cited the national security threat posed by the China-based company as a reason for the ban, given the vast amounts of personal information TikTok collects. TikTok has said it doesn’t share data with the Chinese government.   Thursday was the date the Commerce Department had set to implement an executive order that would have forbidden U.S. companies from providing internet and content delivery services to TikTok, which would have effectively shut down its ability to operate in the U.S. […]

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Russian, North Korean hackers targeted COVID-19 vaccine researchers — and some attacks got through, Microsoft says

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Three hacking groups connected to the Russian and North Korean governments targeted COVID-19 vaccine and treatment researchers across five nations in recent months, and some of their attacks were successful, Microsoft said Friday. The hackers went after seven prominent companies in Canada, France, India, South Korea and the United States, according to Microsoft. The hacking groups are the Russia-linked Fancy Bear, which Microsoft refers to as Strontium; the North Korea-connected organization Lazarus Group, which Microsoft calls Zinc; and a third North Korean group that Microsoft has not previously mentioned publicly, which it calls Cerium. Microsoft’s alert deepens the breadth of warnings from government agencies and cybersecurity companies: Hackers affiliated with some of the U.S.’s biggest adversaries in cyberspace are hard at work to hack others’ vaccine research. “Among the targets, the majority are vaccine makers that have Covid-19 vaccines in various stages of clinical trials,”  Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and […]

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