The importance of assuring the security and testing quality of third-party provided applications is more than evident when you consider an NHS reported data breach of 150,000 patient records this month. The NHS said the breach was caused by a coding error in a GP application called SystmOne, developed by UK based 'The Phoenix Partnership' (TTP). The same assurances also applies to internally developed applications, case-in-point was a publically announced flaw with Thomas Cook's booking system discovered by a Norwegian security researcher. The research used to app flaw to access the names and flights details of Thomas Cook passengers and release details on his blog. Thomas Cook said the issue has since been fixed.
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) fined Facebook £500,000, the maximum possible, over the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal, which impacted some 87 million Facebook users. Fortunately for Facebook, the breach occurred before the General Data Protection Regulation came into force in May, as the new GDPR empowers the ICO with much tougher financial penalties design to bring tech giants to book, let's be honest, £500k is petty cash for the social media giant.
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A UK government report criticised the security of Huawei products, concluded the government had "only limited assurance" Huawei kit posed no threat toUK national security. I remember being concerned many years ago when I heard BT had ditched US Cisco routers for Huawei routers to save money, not much was said about the national security aspect at the time. The UK gov report was written by the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC), which was set up in 2010 in response to concerns that BT and other UK companies reliance on the Chinese manufacturer's devices, by the way, that body is overseen by GCHQ.
Banking hacking group "MoneyTaker" has struck again, this time stealing a reported £700,000 from a Russia bank according to Group-IB. The group is thought to be behind several other hacking raids against UK, US, and Russian companies. The gang compromise a router which gave them access to the bank's internal network, from that entry point, they were able to find the specific system used to authorise cash transfers and then set up the bogus transfers to cash out £700K.
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Dixons Carphone said hackers attempted to compromise 5.9 million payment cards and accessed 1.2 million personal data records. The company, which was heavily criticised for poor security and fined £400,000 by the ICO in January after been hacked in 2015, said in a statement the hackers had attempted to gain access to one of the processing systems of Currys PC World and Dixons Travel stores. The statement confirmed 1.2 million personal records had been accessed by the attackers. No details were disclosed explaining how hackers were able to access such large quantities of personal data, just a typical cover statement of "the investigation is still ongoing". It is likely this incident occurred before the GDPR law kicked in at the end of May, so the company could be spared the new more significant financial penalties and sanctions the GDPR gives the ICO, but it is certainly worth watching the ICO response to a repeat offender which had already received a record ICO fine this year. The ICO (statement) and the NCSC (statement) both have released statements about this breach.
Ticketmaster reported the data theft of up to 40,000 UK customers, which was caused by security weakness in a customer support app, hosted by Inbenta Technologies, an external third-party supplier to Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster informed affected customers to reset their passwords and has offered (to impacted customers) a free 12-month identity monitoring service with a leading provider. No details were released on how the hackers exploited the app to steal the data, likely to be a malware-based attack. However, there are questions on whether Ticketmaster disclosed and responded to the data breach quick enough, after digital banking company Monzo, claimed the Ticketmaster website showed up as a CPP (Common Point of Purchase) in an above-average number of recent fraud reports. The company noticed 70% of fraudulent transactions with stolen payment cards had used the Ticketmaster site between December 2017 and April 2018. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre said it was monitoring the situation.
TSB customers were targetted by fraudsters after major issues with their online banking systems was reported. The TSB technical issues were caused by a botched system upgrade rather than hackers. TSB bosses admitted 1,300 UK customers had lost money to cyber crooks during its IT meltdown, all were said to be fully reimbursed by the bank.
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) issued Yahoo a £250,000 fine after an investigation into the company's 2014 breach, which is a pre-GDPR fine. Hackers were able to exfiltrate 191 server backup files from the internal Yahoo network. These backups held the personal details of 8.2 million Yahoo users, including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed password and other security data. The breach only came to light as the company was being acquired by Verizon.
Facebook woes continue, this time a bug changed the default sharing setting of 14 million Facebook users to "public" between 18th and 22nd May. Users who may have been affected were said to have been notified on the site’s newsfeed.
Chinese Hackers were reported as stealing secret US Navy missile plans. It was reported that Chinese Ministry of State Security hackers broke into the systems of a contractor working at the US Naval Undersea Warfare Center, lifting a massive 614GB of secret information, which included the plans for a supersonic anti-ship missile launched from a submarine. The hacks occurred in January and February this year according to a report in the Washington Post.
Elon Musk (Telsa CEO) claimed an insider sabotaged code and stole confidential company information. According to CNBC, in an email to staff, Elon wrote “I was dismayed to learn this weekend about a Tesla employee who had conducted quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations. This included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties". Telsa has filed a lawsuit accusing a disgruntled former employee of hacking into the systems and passing confidential data to third parties. In the lawsuit, it said the stolen information included photographs and video of the firm's manufacturing systems, and the business had suffered "significant and continuing damages" as a result of the misconduct.
IoT Security
As always, a busy month for security patching, Microsoft released 50 patches, 11 of which were rated as Critical. Adobe released their monthly fix for Flash Player and a critical patch for a zero-day bug being actively exploited. Cisco released patches to address 34 vulnerabilities, 5 critical, and a critical patch for their Access Control System. Mozilla issued a critical patch for the Firefox web browser.
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