Monday 3 September 2018

Cyber Security Roundup for August 2018

The largest data breach disclosed this month was by T-Mobile, the telecoms giant said there had been "unauthorised access" to potentially 2 million of their 77 million customer accounts. According to the media, a hacker took advantage of a vulnerability in a T-Mobile API (application programming interface). It was a vulnerable API used by Air Canada mobile App which was also exploited, resulting in the compromise of 20,000 Air Canada customer accounts. Air Canada promptly forced a password change to all of its 77 million customer accounts as a result, however, the airline faced criticism from security experts for advising a weak password strength. Namely, a password length of 8, made up of just characters and digits. Both of these hacks underline the importance of regularly penetration testing Apps and their supporting infrastructure, including their APIs.

Hackers stole up to 34,000 Butlin guest records, reportedly breaching the UK holiday camp firm through a phishing email. Dixons Carphone upped the estimated number of customer records breached in a hack last year from 1.2 million to 10 million, which includes 5.9 million payment cards. There was no explanation offered by Dixons to why it had taken so long to get a grip on the scale of the data breach, which was reported as occurring in July 2017.

Huawei continues to face scrutiny over the security of their products after the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) issued a warning about using the Chinese tech manufacturing giant's devices in a security report. Huawei recently took over from Apple as the world's second largest provider of smartphones. A 16 year old Australian 'Apple fanboy' found himself in court after hacking into Apple's network.

On the international scene, Microsoft announced it had thwarted Russian data-stealing attacks against US anti-Trump conservative groups, by taking down six domains which hosted mimicked websites, which were likely to be used in future phishing campaigns. The Bank of Spain's website was taken out by a DDoS attack, and a Chinese Hotel Group's 140Gb customer database was found for sale on the dark web. The PGA golf championship was hit by a ransomware, and the FBI arrested three key members of the notorious FIN7 hacking group, the group is said to be responsible for stealing millions of credit card and customer details from businesses across the world.

On the personal front, the EC-Council confirmed my Computer Hacking Forensic Investigation (CHFI) certification had been renewed until 2021. I dropped into B-Sides Manchester this month, the highlight was a demonstration of a vulnerability found by Secarma researches, namely a PHP flaw which places CMS sites at risk of remote code execution

There was plenty of critical security patches released by the usual suspects, such as Microsoft, Cisco, and Adobe, the latter firm released several out-of-band patches during August. A critical update was released for Apache Struts (popular web server) and a reminder that Fax machines and all-in-one devices network devices could be used as a way into corporate networks by hackers.

Finally, there were a couple of interesting cybercrime articles posted on the BBC's news website this month,  Cyber-Attack! Would your firm handle it better than this? and Unpicking the Cyber-Crime Economy

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AWARENESS, EDUCATION AND THREAT INTELLIGENCE

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