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The Party Is Not Over! 250,000 Twitter accounts compromised!
The Information Security Community is still commenting the Cyber Attacks against U.S. media companies and here it is another clamorous news in this February Weekend!
On the wake of the admissions made by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Twitter has revelaed in a blog post, to have detected, over the last week, unusual access patterns that led to identify unauthorized access attempts to some user data. They even discovered, and were able to shut down, one live attack, but their effort did not prevent the attackers to access user information for 250,000 users. The compromised data for the affected users includes : usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted passwords.
As a precautionary security measure, the social network has reset the passwords and revoked the session tokens for the affected accounts. The impacted users would have received (or will soon receive) an email, notifying them to create a new password.
This is not the first time that a primary social network is hacked: on June 2012 LinkedIn had 6.5 million accounts compromised.
The problem is that our online experience is getting harder and harder: counting (and immediately patching) all the exploitable 0-day vulnerabilities of the browsers and their components is getting harder and harder (see the Java saga for example), and apparently even protection technologies are not so useful…
16-31 December 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline
The year is gone, and here it is the last Cyber Attack Timeline for 2012 (first part here).
The most important cyber-events of this second part of December can be considered: the third phase of the operation Ababil carried on by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters against U.S. Banks, the attacks of the Anonymous collective against the Westboro Baptist Church, and, last but not least the Cyberwar echoes coming from Iran.
The wave of DDoS attacks carried on by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters has taken down Six U.S. Banks under the fists of DDoS attacks apparently unstoppable. Instead the Anonymous seem to have changed tactic in their personal fight against the Westboro Baptist Church, they did not limit to DDoS the church’s website, but also performed a couple of Twitter account takeover against some key persons (with the collaboration of UGNazi members).
Instead, on the Cyberwar front, Iran confirms to be a danger zone, with some reports of a new Wiper and a simil-Stuxnet malware (even if this second news has been downplayed in a second moment.
Other noticeable news include an alleged breach to Yahoo!, a massive breach against a Chinese HP domain and a strange, controversial breach against Verizon FiOS (with data apparently leaked six months ago).
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 and the related statistics (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts). To do so, you can use this form.
16-30 November 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline
November has gone and it’s time to review this month’s cyber landscape.
From a Cyber Crime perspective, November 2012 will be probably remembered for the breach to Nationwide, one of the largest insurance and financial services providers in the US, a breach that has potentially left up to 1 million users exposed. Unfortunately, in terms of massive breaches, this is not the only remarkable event of the month, just at the end Acer India has suffered a massive cyber attack culminated in the leak of nearly 15,000 records. Not comparable with the breach that affected Nationwide, but for sure of big impact.
Also on the cyber-espionage front this month has been interesting: JAXA, the Japan Space agency has been targeted by yet another targeted attack (after January 2012) and Symantec has discovered W32.Narilam, a new destructive malware targeting several nations in Middle East.
The hacktivist front has been characterized by the dramatic events in Gaza, the attacks have reached a peak around the first half of the month (as in the first part, I did not take into consideration the attacks carried on in name of OpIsrael for which I wrote a dedicated timeline), in any case the Anonymous have found another way to mark this month, leaking 1 Gb of documents from the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Last but not least, this month has seen three large-scale DNS Poisoning attacks (against the Pakistani Registrar PKNIC, Inc., GoDaddy, and the Romanian Registrar). A very rare occurrence!
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 and the related statistics (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
Related articles
- 1-15 November 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics (hackmageddon.com)
- Timeline of Opisrael (hackmageddon.com)
Timeline of Opisrael
After the ceasefire of the 21st of November, the cyber attacks against Israel, executed in name of OpIsrael, have come to a break.
The contemporaneous ceasefire in the real world and in the cyber space has confirmed the two dimensional nature of this conflict. A conflict in which even the social media played a crucial role: IDF chose Twitter to make the first official announcement of the airstrike that killed Ahmed Al-Jaabari, and subsequently during the stages of operation Pillar of Defence Twitter has been intensively used by the two opposite factions for actions of propaganda, psyops, and even to divulge official news of the war operations.
Since the Ion Cannons are not shooting, this is the best moment to analyze the cyber attacks. At this purpose, in the following table I tried to summarize the timeline of the main events that have characterized this operation (and in general all the cyber attacks executed against Israel since the 14th of November).
Of course I do not pretend to be exhaustive: more than 44 million of cyber attacks in a week are impossible to enumerate singularly.
October 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline
Click here for the first part covering the Cyber Attacks from 1 to 15 October 2012.
Here is the timeline for the main Cyber Attacks in October 2012. A month that has been characterized by hacktivism and also by several remarkable cyber crime operations.
For sure the next days will be hard for taxpayers of South Carolina, whose Department of Revenue has been targeted by foreign hackers able to access records of 3.6 million of individuals. But hard days are going to come also for banks: not only the trail of DDoS attack against U.S. Banks has continued even in the second half of the month (although different groups took credit for them), but also, on the cyber crime front, Citigroup has lost 1 million of bucks because of a loophole exploited by a ring of 13 individuals. Different motivations, same lesson: bank security needs a dramatic improvement.
Moving to hactkivism, nothing new under the sun. The pale sun of October has enlightened several operations targeting governments (Greece and Italy above all, to reflect the delicate situation of these two countries) and organization all over the world…
As usual after the jump you will find all the references.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 and the related statistics (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
Read more…
DDoS and SQLi are the Most… Discussed Attack Techniques
Imperva has just published the results of its annual analysis on one of the largest-known hacker forums counting approximately 250,000 members.
The research (also made on other smaller forums) used the forum’s search engine capabilities to analyze conversations by topic using specific keywords. Unfortunately no details have been provided about the methodology used to collect the data, however the results show that SQL Injection and DDoS are the most discussed topic, both of them with the 19% of discussion volume (I am glad to see that the results are coherent with the findings of my Cyber Attack Statistics).
Of course the data must be taken with the needed caution since the analyzed sample could not be entirely consistent. As Imperva admits: “The site we examined is not a hardcore crime site, but it’s not entirely softcore. New hackers come to this site to learn and,on the other hand, more experienced hackers teach to gain “street cred” and recognition […]. Typically, once hackers have gained enough of a reputation, they go to a more hardcore, invitation-only forum.” This probably means that the incidence of the two attack techniques is overrated since one should expect a beginner hacker to approach the easiest and most common attack methods for which there are many tools available.
Anyway the events of the last months show that an attack does not deserve less attention only because it is carried on by a beginner, nor a beginner worries too much if he uses automated tools without full knowledge and awareness. A look to the infosec chronicles of the last period is sufficient to verify that DDoS and SQLi attacks are always in the first pages.
Sadly, Imperva estimates that only the 5% of the security budget is spent on thwarting SQL Injection attacks.
Other interesting findings of the research are: the fact that social networks pose a major interest for hackers since they are becoming a prominent source of information and potential monetary gain (Facebook was the most discussed social media platform, with 39%, immediately followed by Twitter at 37%), and also the fact that E-whoring is becoming one of the most common methods for beginner cyber criminals to gain easy money (more than 13,000 threads observed).
Hack’n Roll: Here’s The Special Chart of Singers Who Had Their Twitter Account Hacked
Octo
ber 2012 has deserved a bad surprise for the members of the famous rock band Garbage, who had their official Twitter account hacked from an unknown cybercrook who enjoyed posting bogus messages to their nearly 60k followers.
Unfortunately, among the music stars, they are not the only ones who have suffered this sad fate, and actually, since 2009 to present, the list is quite long.
Britney Spears opens this special chart, which also includes high-profile singers such as Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Kesha. Brit currently holds the unwelcome record to have been hacked twice, but the group of the victims is quite varied and covers different genres: pranksters and cybercrooks, at least from this point of view, have proven to be impartial.
The accounts have been hacked for different motivations: scam, hacktivism, or simple fun, and accessed via lost phones or by mean of brute-force or password-guessing techniques.
Famous singers are used to be on top of selling charts.I believe they willingly avoid to rank at the top of this unwelcome chart (after the jump you will find the related links).
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated), at the Cyber Attack Statistics, and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
16-30 September 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline
Part One with 1-15 September 201 Timeline Here.
September is over and it’s time to analyze this month from an Information Security perspective with the second part of the Cyber Attack Timeline.
Probably this month will be remembered for the massive outage of six U.S. Banks (Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo and PNC ) caused by a wave of DDoS attack carried on by alleged Muslim hackers in retaliation for the infamous movie (maybe this term is exaggerated) “The Innocence of Muslims”.
China has confirmed its intense activity inside the Cyber space. Alleged (state-sponsored?) Chinese hackers were allegedly behind the attack to Telvent, whose project files of its core product OASyS SCADA were stolen after a breach, and also behind a thwarted spear-phishing cyber attack against the White House.
Adobe suffered a high-profile breach which caused a build server to be compromised with the consequent theft of a certificate key used to sign two malware strains found on the wild (with the consequent necessary revoke of the compromised key affecting approximately 1,100 files).
Last but not least, the Hacktivism fever has apparently dropped. September has offered some attacks on the wake of the #OpFreeAssange campaign, and a new wave of attacks at the end of the month after the global protests set for September, the 29th, under the hashtag of #29s.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 and the related statistics (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
Give Me Twitter And Pastebin And I Will Hack The World!
Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. And this rule worths also for the Infosec Matrix…
Yesterday, while a five-hour outage, due to an alleged DDoS cyber attack initially claimed by the Anonymous, left GoDaddy unable to serve millions of websites (panicking millions of Internet Users), a digital publishing company named BlueToad came forward to take responsibility for the leak of a million iOS unique device identifiers (UDIDs). For sure you will remember that the same infamous collective claimed to have stolen the UDIDs from an FBI laptop few days ago.
Probably the FBI had really nothing to deal with the hack, since yesterday BlueToad admitted (and apologized) to have been breached and that the UDIDs were stolen just in that circumstance.
And as if that was not enough, hour after hour even the alleged cyber attack to GoDaddy has taken a paradoxical turn: after the initial claims, the Anonymous have denied the responsibility for the action (at first marked as the latest form of protest against GoDaddy’s support to SOPA), and have also mocked @AnonymousOwn3r, the alleged author of the attack, who self-proclaimed (sic) “security leader of Anonymous because I’m behind many things such like irc, ops, attacks, and many“.
Now the latest coup de théâtre: there’s no IRC bot behind GoDaddy’s outage (as claimed by the alleged author), but a much less romantic series of (unspecified) internal network events that corrupted data tables, apparently “simple” (for those famliar with networking) routing issues.
And they are two… In the same day, two alleged cyber attack initially claimed by the Anonymous, and then proven to be false. And even if it is not so common to discover two in the same day, fake cyber attacks are becoming quite frequent (think for instance to the alleged hack to Philips, old data leaked in February according to the Dutch Giant, and to Sony). Of course the point are not the Anonymous, the point is that claiming hacks and leaks (made by others, or worst totally false) is becoming too simple… Nowadays with Twitter and Pastebin you can (claim to) hack whatever you want (as an example I often find on pastebin dumps repeated several times and claimed by different authors).
Maybe it is time to take with caution and skepticism the news of massive leaks.
Antisec Steals 12M Apple Device IDs from FBI (Exploiting a Java Vulnerability) UPDATED
Update 4 Sep 23:38 GMT+2: The FBI issued a tweet denying that it ever had the 12 million Apple IDs in question:
Statement soon on reports that one of our laptops with personal info was hacked. We never had info in question. Bottom Line: TOTALLY FALSE
—
FBI PressOffice (@FBIPressOffice) September 04, 2012Here the complete Statement from the FBI Press Office.
Original Post: Few hours ago, the @AnonymousIRC Twitter account has announced yet another resounding cyber attack carried on in name of the #Antisec movement:
1,000,001 from a total of 12,000,000 iOS devices, courtesy of FBI pastebin.com/nfVT7b0Z #Anonymous #AntiSec
—
(@AnonymousIRC) September 04, 2012In a special edition of their #FFF refrain (literally quoting the authors of the attack: “so special that’s even not on friday”), the Hacktivists claim to have obtained from FBI 12,000,000 Apple Devices UDIDs (UDID is the short form for Unique Device Identifier, the unique string of numbers that univocally identifies each iOS device), and have consequently published 1,000,001 of them in pastebin post.
In the same post they explain how they were able to obtain them:
During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java, during the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of “NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv” turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc. the personal details fields referring to people appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts. no other file on the same folder makes mention about this list or its purpose.
Did you notice the misplaced detail? Actually I could not help but notice that the UDIDs were obtained exploiting a Java vulnerability, the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability (CVE-2012-0507). A detail is not so important in other circumstances, if it had not disclosed only few days after the controversies following the discovery of a potentially devastating 0-day for Java, and the subsequent issues deriving from the release of a vulnerable patch.
There could be no worse moment for this event to happen, and I am afraid it will contribute to add fuel to the raising concerns regarding Java security… Hard days for Java… And for the FBI
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08/13/2011 - My Post on Android Malware Mentioned on Engadget.
04/14/2011 - The Article Smart Grid: L'ultima Frontiera del Cybercrime published on ICT Security Magazine May 2011.
03/14/2011 - Security Summit 2011: Paolo Passeri guest at Round Table "Mobile Security: Rischi, Tecnologie, Mercato"
02/14/2011 - The Article Gears of Cyberwar published on ICT Security Magazine January 2011.
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