Thursday, 1 December 2016

Cyber Security Roundup for November 2016

Several major UK household brands made the headlines for wrong reasons following cyber attacks in October. Tesco Bank refunded £2.5 million to over 20,000 of its customers after Tesco Bank account credentials were hacked and account funds were stolen. Mobile giant ‘Three’ said 6 million of its customer’s personal data records could be at risk after hundreds of new mobile phones were stolen following the hack of a Three employee account. The National Lottery disclosed 26,500 of its online customer accounts had been accessed by hackers, leading to three arrests. Elsewhere a 17 year old pleaded guilty to taking part in the recent TalkTalk hack.

The next evolution of ransomware has arrived with a new variant called Ransoc, and it's pretty nasty. The malware scans internet history, social media accounts, Skype and photos, and then uses any found illegal, embarrassing and sensitive information to threaten the victim’s reputation should a payment not be sent. 

It turns out locked computer desktops aren’t as safe as you might think after a security researcher Samy Kamar released details of new attacking method called PoisonTap. Samy is famous for hacking MySpace with a worm way back in the day, I had the pleasure of meeting him a few years ago - An Evening with Samy, creator of the Samy MySpace Worm. In simple terms PoisonTap works by plugging a £4 Raspberry Pi Zero computer configured with hacking tools into a USB port, forcing the USB port to act as a network port, the tool is able to eavesdrop non-encrypted network traffic and steal web sessions from web browser sessions running in the background on PCs and Apple Macs, despite the desktop being locked with password protection. Samy released the source code for PoisonTap on Github, and I intend to create a PoisonTap tool for myself in the next few days.

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