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Are Teens Giving The CIA A Headache?
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Teenage hackers are making merry with the online world of CIA director of national intelligence James Clapper.
This is the second bout of attacks from the group of technology tearaways, according to Motherboard, which reports on the Clapper problem and its connection to a group known as Crackas With Attitude.
A member of the group, a young chap called Cracka, told Motherboard that access to a range of Clapper accounts had been seized, and that Clapper and the CIA haven’t a clue what’s going on.
“I’m pretty sure they don’t even know they’ve been hacked. You asked why I did it. I just wanted the gov to know people aren’t fucking around, people know what they’re doing and people don’t agree #FreePalestine,” he said.
The claims were supported by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which confirmed that something has happened and that the authorities are looking into it.
“We’re aware of the matter and we reported it to the appropriate authorities,” said spokesman Brian Hale, before going mute.
Cracka, representing himself on Twitter as @dickreject, is less quiet. He has tweeted a number of confirmatory and celebratory messages that are not particularly flattering about the CIA and its abilities.
This is the group’s second bite at the CIA cherry. The teenagers walked into the personal email account of CIA director John Brennan last year and had a good look around. Some of the impact of this was washed away when it was discovered that Brennan used an AOL account for his communications.
“A hacker, who describes himself as an American high school student, has breached the CIA boss’s AOL email account and found a host of sensitive government files that one assumes a government official shouldn’t be sending to his personal email address,” said security comment kingpin Graham Cluley at the time.
“I’m not sure what’s more embarrassing. Being hacked or having an AOL email account.”
Courtesy-TheInq
Can Corporations Be Easily Hacked?
Hacking a major corporation is so easy that even an elderly grannie could do it, according to technology industry character John McAfee.
McAfee said that looking at the world’s worst hacks you can see a common pattern – they were not accomplished using the most sophisticated hacking tools.
Writing in IBTImes said that the worst attack was in 2012 attack on Saudi Aramco, one of the world’s largest oil companies. Within hours, nearly 35,000 distinct computer systems had their functionality crippled or destroyed, causing a massive disruption to the world’s oil supply chain. It was made possible by an employee that was fooled into clicking a bogus link sent in an email.
He said 90 per cent of hacking was social engineering, and it is the human elements in your organization that are going to determine how difficult, or how easy, it will be to hack you.
The user is the weakest link in the chain of computing trust, imperfect by nature. And all of the security software and hardware in the world will not keep a door shut if an authorized user can be convinced to open it, he said.
“Experienced hackers don’t concern themselves with firewalls, anti-spyware software, anti-virus software, encryption technology. Instead they want to know whether your management personnel are frequently shuffled; whether your employees are dissatisfied; whether nepotism is tolerated; whether your IT managers have stagnated in their training and self-improvement.”
Muct of this information can be picked up on the dark web and the interernet underground, he added.
“”Are you prepared for a world where grandma or anyone else can quickly obtain, on the wide open web, all of the necessary information for a social engineering hack? Is your organization prepared.
Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/can-corporations-be-easily-hacked.html
Was The Hilton Hotel Chain Hacked In April?
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The Hilton organization is reportedly trying to work out whether it has been hacked and, if so, what it should do about it.
We say reportedly as we have not been able to contact Hilton ourselves and can rely only on reports. They are pretty solid reports, however, and they concern a problem at the company that happened between 21 April and 27 July.
Brian Krebs, of KrebsOnSecurity, started this off with a report about a payment card breach. Krebs said that he had heard about the breach from various sources, and that Visa – the card provider – has mailed potentially affected parties with a warning, and the news that it is the fault of a bricks and mortar company.
Visa did not name the company, but affected parties, or banks to be more precise, have uttered it to Krebs. Its name is Hilton.
“Sources at five different banks say they have now determined that the common point-of-purchase for cards included in that alert had only one commonality: they were all were used at Hilton properties, including the company’s flagship Hilton locations as well as Embassy Suites, Doubletree, Hampton Inn and Suites, and the upscale Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts,” he wrote.
“It remains unclear how many Hilton properties may be affected by this apparent breach. Several sources in the financial industry told KrebsOnSecurity that the incident may date back to November 2014, and may still be ongoing.”
Krebs has a statement from the Hilton organisation in which the firm defended its security practices, and revealed that it is aware of the potential problem and is looking into it. This is a common theme among the breached, and should soon become part of mission statements.
“Hilton Worldwide is strongly committed to protecting our customers’ credit card information,” said the company in the statement to Krebs.
“We have many systems in place and work with some of the top experts in the field to address data security. Unfortunately the possibility of fraudulent credit card activity is all too common for every company in today’s marketplace. We take any potential issue very seriously, and we are looking into this matter.”
We have asked Visa and Hilton for their comments.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/was-the-hilton-hotel-chain-hacked-in-april.html
Hackers Accessed 10M Records At Excellus
September 23, 2015 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Hackers have penetrated the IT systems of U.S. health insurer Excellus BlueCross BlueShield and gained access to personal, financial and medical information of more than 10 million people, the company has disclosed.
The initial attack occurred in December 2013, but the company did not learn about it until Aug. 5. Since then it has been working with the FBI and cybersecurity firm Mandiant to investigate the breach.
The hackers may have had access to customer records which include names, addresses, telephone
numbers, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, member identification numbers, financial accounts and medical claims information.
Records may contain all or just some of that information, depending on the customer’s relationship with the company. The breach doesn’t affect just Excellus members, but also members of other Blue Cross Blue Shield plans who sought medical treatment in the upstate New York area serviced by the company.
The information was encrypted, but the attackers gained administrative privileges to the IT systems, allowing them to potentially access it, the company said on a website that was set up to provide information about the incident.
No evidence has been found yet that the data was copied or misused by the attackers.
Excellus will send breach notification letters via mail to all affected persons throughout the month and is offering free credit monitoring and identity protection services for two years through a partner.
The company will not contact affected individuals via email or telephone, so any emails or phone calls claiming to be from the company in regard to this attack should be ignored as they are probably scams.
The incident comes after three other Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurers — Anthem, Premera and CareFirst — announced large data breaches this year as a result of cyberattacks.
Excellus said that it doesn’t have sufficient information about the Anthem, Premera and CareFirst investigations in order to comment about possible connections between those attacks and the one against its own systems.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/hackers-accessed-10m-records-at-excellus.html
Web.com Latest Hacking Victim
Hackers gain unauthorized access to the computers of Internet services provider Web.com Group and stole credit card information of 93,000 customers.
According to a website set up by the company to share information about the incident, Web.com discovered the security breach on Aug. 13 as part of its ongoing security monitoring.
Attackers compromised credit card information for around 93,000 accounts, as well as the names and addresses associated with them. No other customer information like social security numbers was affected, the company said.
According to the company, the verification codes for the exposed credit cards were not leaked. However, there are websites on the Internet that don’t require such codes for purchases.
Web.com has notified affected customers via email and will also follow up with letters sent through the U.S. Postal Service. Those users can sign up for a one-year free credit monitoring service.
The company did not specify how the intruders gained access to its systems, but has hired a “nationally recognized” IT security firm to conduct an investigation.
Web.com provides a variety of online services, including website and Facebook page design, e-commerce and marketing solutions, domain registration and Web hosting. The company claims to have over 3.3 million customers and owns two other well known Web services companies: Register.com and Network Solutions.
Register.com and Network Solutions customers were not impacted by this breach unless they also purchased services directly from Web.com.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/web-com-latest-victim-of-credit-card-hacking.html
Self-Healing Software On The Way
Researchers at the University of Utah have developed self-healing software that detects, expunges and protects against malware in virtual machines.
Called Advanced Adaptive Applications (A3), the software suite was created in collaboration with US defence contractor Raytheon BBN over a period of four years.
It was funded by DARPA through its Clean-Slate Design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts programme, and was completed in September, Science Daily reported on Thursday.
A3 features “stackable debuggers”, a number of debugging applications that cooperate to monitor virtual machines for indications of unusual behaviour.
Instead of checking computer object code against a catalogue of known viruses and other malware, the A3 software suite can detect the operation of malicious code heuristically, based on the types of function it attempts.
Once the A3 software detects malicious code, it can apparently suspend the offending process or thread – stopping it in its tracks – repair the damage and remove it from the virtual machine environment, and learn to recognise that piece of malware to prevent it entering the system again.
The self-healing software was developed for military applications to support cyber security for mission-critical systems, but it could also be useful in commercial web hosting and cloud computing operations.
If malware gets into such systems, A3 software could detect and repair the attack within minutes.
The university and Raytheon demonstrated the A3 software suite to DARPA in September by testing it against the notorious Shellshock exploit known as the Bash Bug.
A3 detected and repaired the Shellshock attack on a web server within four minutes. The project team also tested A3 successfully on another six examples of malware.
Eric Eide, the research associate professor of computer science who led the A3 project team along with computer science associate professor John Regehr, said: “It’s pretty cool when you can pick the Bug of the Week and it works.”
The A3 self-healing software suite is open source, so it’s free for anyone to use, and the university researchers would like to extend its applicability to cloud computing environments and, perhaps eventually, end-user computing.
Professor Eide said: “A3 technologies could find their way into consumer products someday, which would help consumer devices protect themselves against fast-spreading malware or internal corruption of software components. But we haven’t tried those experiments yet.”