Displaying items by tag: Data Theft

Over the weekend a number of articles broke describing a “hack” that allowed nude photos of celebrities to be stolen and then reposted on the internet (4chan). Although the story held minimal interest at the time of its release we did not see it as big news since phone and cloud service hacks are far too common these days, just because it happened to be someone famous did not make it anymore news worthy. If anything it made it less as you should not be storing nude or explicit images of yourself on your phone or in any cloud service these days.

It won’t happen to me is the battle cry of far too many companies these days when it comes to security. We have watches this mind set over the course of the last two years as businesses try to get out of the expense (time and money) needed to update or properly protect their companies and customers from data theft. One of the very recent and troubling ones is the Backoff malware that has hit an estimated 1,000 US businesses. Even Dairy Queen has been hit and consumer payment card data stolen.

On October 4th Adobe was forced to send out almost three million emails with the unfortunate news that their network had been attacked, breached and data stolen. The data from that theft included account IDs as well as encrypted passwords and credit/debit card information and even source code for Adobe products. The attack happened not all that long after Adobe pushed their users to a subscription based license for their products. Once a large number of people had joined the Creative Cloud service Adobe was an even more attractive target and due to their history or ignoring security the attackers were able to get in and grab what they wanted.

Today (Sunday July 21 2013) Apple officially admitted that someone had hacked their developer site. The notification came out as a warning that some information including names, addresses and email information might have been accessed. What we find interesting is that this announcement comes on the heels of a multi-day outage to the same site. It looks like Apple might have known about the breach earlier and not told anyone until they confirmed that user data was compromised (in which case they might have been compelled to). This is not exactly what you want to hear from a company that prides themselves on the security and safety of their operating system AND their ecosystem.

Someone is claiming that the one million UDIDs posted by Anonymous actually were taken from them and not the FBI or Apple. The company Blue Toad from Orlando FL says that they checked the pastebin file and it was a 98% match for their database. This is an interesting twist in the events that have seen Apple, the FBI and even AT&T linked to surveillance of Apple phones through the use of the UDID (Unique Device IDentifier). Apple has already stated that the UDID will no longer be supported in the next version of their iOS software that is expected to be released to the world tomorrow.

We have said this once and we will say it again; 2012 will be remembered as the year of the breach. This year alone we have seen a significant number of services penetrated with relative ease and user account information pulled out at an alarming rate. So far this year we have watched as Linkedin, eHarmony, Last.fm, Formspring, League of Legends and more have been compromised and literally Millions of user account details have been posted to the Internet. It is a very disturbing trend considering the rather big push to the cloud for so many critical services (like hosting our personal records).

An interesting report has popped up about a rather large attack on a group of Middle Eastern countries. The attack (called Flame) appears to be a targeted attack against Iran, Israel, Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt with the most effected being Iran, Palestine, and Israel. The attack was reported by Kaspersky Labs and looks to be intended to collect all kinds of information (not just data on computers). Kaspersky believes that Flame has been operating for at least two years in this region.

There is an old saying; “ I cannot give you what I do not have and I cannot tell you what I do not know”. It is with this philosophy in mind that a new Internet Service Provider is seeking to hit the market. The man behind this new company also happens to be one of the only ISP owners to ever fight and win against an FBI request for subscriber information; Nicholas Merrill.

Looking at bills like SOPA, PIPA and CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) it is easy to see the argument for Civil Liberties, Censorship, Personal Privacy and Private Communications. In fact we hear about this on a daily basis from groups like Anonymous, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future and more. However, while all of these arguments are very valid and ring in the ears of voters and consumers everywhere there is another threat that many are overlooking. This threat might even be larger than the ones that are talked about over and over; the security threat.