Category Archives: Oliver Hough

PasteBin just made it easier for hackers to avoid detection, researchers say

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A policy change at a seemingly innocuous website could make it more difficult to stop hackers, according to information security experts who track malicious software in the wild. PasteBin, a text repository where developers share internet code, said on Wednesday it has discontinued a service that charged users a $50 one-time fee to search the site for new data. Researchers had used the scraping API to scour PasteBin for cybercriminal activity, as hackers frequently posted stolen personal data and malicious code to the site. PasteBin has a lot of legitimate activity, including posts about software tests and blocks of banal code meant for cryptographic network protocols. The malicious activity makes up a fraction of the content, and is difficult to identify without scraping capabilities because of the construction of the site. A number of Twitter feeds, like @ScumBots and @leak_scavenger, were dedicated to catching malicious uploads early, and then distributing details early […]

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Instagram data from 14 million profiles found in insecure database, researcher says

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Information about more than 14 million Instagram accounts is being kept in an insecure database that could render users vulnerable to hackers, a security researcher told CyberScoop Friday. Data including users’ profile names, stored links to profile pictures and their Instagram ID is available in the database, which researcher Oliver Hough found on the Shodan web scanning service. The database, physically located in the U.K., includes 14,526,602 entries, according to a screenshot Hough tweeted Friday. Entries also have empty fields for home addresses and telephone numbers, he said. It’s not clear who is logging the information. But Hough suggested a third party could be scraping Instagram and storing public data for analysis later, either for targeted marketing or another purpose. He suggested the information could be combined with unrelated databases of stolen passwords, which hackers could correlate with the usernames leaked here to try to infiltrate victims’ accounts. “On the black hat side […]

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