Sunday, May 22, 2016

Issue 65 - Week of May 16th

1.       Hacker steals money from bank and donates $11,000 to Anti-ISIS group: Sounds like a Robin Hood Hacker - he hacked an unnamed bank and donated the money to Kurdish anti-ISIS Group. The same hacker had breached Hacking Team last year. This is an example of a hacker putting their skills to political use, while some have applauded his efforts, others are not impressed with the tactics used to raise the funds.

2.       Schools pay ransom to recover data: In February - 53 schools in a US county discovered that they had been hit by Ransomware. Even though the schools had backups, it figured that the restoration effort of this size to remote servers can take weeks, and each day the students and teachers do not have access to data -has a dollar value which rapidly exceeds the cost of paying the ransom. Hence, the school district paid the criminals nearly $10,000 to get the keys needed to decrypt their data. In Issue 61 - we had discussed about a new ransomware that targets schools & hospitals. In Feb - A Hollywood hospital had paid $17K as ransom.

3.       Hacker puts up 167 million LinkedIn passwords for sale: LinkedIn suffered a data breach in 2012, with what was believed to be 6.5 million user account passwords posted online. However, four years later, the cyber-attack has come back to haunt LinkedIn with hackers selling data belonging to 167 million users on the dark web. The passwords were protected using the SHA1 algorithm which without salt made cracking the information easy. After legal threats to the hacker search engine - LeakedSource - it has chosen to remove the stolen data for the moment.

4.       1 Million computers hacked for making big money from Adsense: A group of cyber criminals has infected as much as 1 Million computers around the world over the past two years with a piece of malware that hijacks search results pages using a local proxy. The malware drops JavaScript files that downloads and implements a PAC file that hijacks all Web traffic, ensuring traffic routes through an attacker-controlled server, where actual results are replaced with fake Web pages. The goal is to help cyber-criminals earn money from the Google's AdSense program.

5.       Ukrainian hacker admits stealing corporate press releases for $30 Million profit: A 28-year-old Ukrainian hacker has pleaded guilty in the United States to stealing unpublished news releases and using that non-public information in illegal trading to generate more than $30 Million in illicit profits. These hackers would hack into the network of various PR companies to access unpublished Press releases, study them and accordingly buy stocks of those companies. In many cases the prices of the stocks they bought would move up after the actual press release and these hackers would then sell their stocks to make money.

6.       TeslaCrypt ransomware group pulls plug, releases decrypt key: The somewhat surprising move last week by the operators of the TeslaCrypt ransomware sample, to cease operations and publicly release the universal master decryption key for it, is good news for victims of the malware. But the move, welcome as it is, doesn't necessarily mean that the group won’t simply release another sample or start afresh with a new malware campaign altogether, security researchers warned. Andy Settle, head of special investigations at Forcepoint LLC, said it could have been a matter of self-preservation.

7.       Leading antivirus security flaw exposes Linux, Mac and Windows: The antivirus engine used in multiple Symantec products has an easy-to-exploit vulnerability that could allow hackers to easily compromise Linux, Mac and Windows computers.  As Symantec is intercepting system input and output, you only need to email a file -- the victim doesn't even need to read the email, just the act of AV scanning it is a trigger. The flaw was fixed last week via LiveUpdate.

8.       Cyber-attackers targeted Bangladesh official in $81m stealing spree: The cyber-attackers behind a successful cyber-heist which left the Bangladesh central bank $81 million out of pocket targeted the PC of a Bangladeshi official to conduct the theft. According to Reuters, a Bangladesh diplomat admitted last week that a computer belonging to a Bangladesh central bank official was targeted in the attack.

9.       Presidential campaigns hit by hackers: The current US presidential candidates and their campaign sites have become the target of hackers. Officials said motivation for these attacks range “from philosophical differences to espionage,” with nation-state hackers going after candidates’ foreign policy details. Attacks against presidential campaigns are nothing new: the 2008 and 2012 campaigns were hit hard by cyber-attacks as well.


10.   Good-Guy hacker finds flaw that could have drained $25B from an Indian bank: Exploiting a vulnerable mobile application - a security researcher could have stolen as much as $25 Billion from one of the India's biggest banks with the help of just a few lines of code. Being a white hat hacker, he immediately reached out to the bank and alerted it about the critical issues in its mobile app and helped the bank fix them, instead of taking advantage of the security holes to steal money from the bank that has about 25 Billion USD in Deposits. 


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