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Showing posts with the label Data Breach

Malicious Chrome Extensions Are Hijacking Your Data — And You Might Not Even Know It

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Source: The Hacker News A new wave of malicious Chrome extensions is putting millions of users at risk by masquerading as trusted tools like Fortinet VPN, YouTube utilities, and productivity boosters. Despite their appearance, these add-ons are anything but helpful. Once installed, they silently exfiltrate browser cookies, act as proxies for remote servers, and give attackers direct control over a user’s online traffic. Researchers at DomainTools uncovered that many of these extensions—some of which remained available on the Chrome Web Store until recently—were built to appear benign while executing advanced data theft operations behind the scenes. The fake “fortivpn” extension, for example, compressed and encrypted all browser session cookies and transmitted them to a command-and-control server, a tactic more commonly associated with advanced persistent threat actors [1]. The distribution campaign is unusually sophisticated. Threat actors have registered more than 100 convincing domai...

Massive Git Config Breach Exposes 15,000 Credentials; 10,000 Private Repos Cloned

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  Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a "massive" campaign that targets exposed Git configurations to siphon credentials, clone private repositories, and even extract cloud credentials from the source code. The activity, codenamed EMERALDWHALE, is estimated to have collected over 10,000 private repositories and stored in an Amazon S3 storage bucket belonging to a prior victim. The bucket, consisting of no less than 15,000 stolen credentials, has since been taken down by Amazon. "The stolen credentials belong to Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), Email providers, and other services," Sysdig said in a report. "Phishing and spam seem to be the primary goal of stealing the credentials." The multi-faceted criminal operation, while not sophisticated, has been found to leverage an arsenal of private tools to steal credentials as well as scrape Git config files, Laravel .env files, and raw web data. It has not been attributed to any known threat actor or group. Ta...

Lost and Stolen Devices- A Gateway to Data Breaches and Leaks

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In our digital age, data is king. It drives businesses, informs decision-making, and plays an essential role in our everyday lives. However, with the convenience of technology comes the risk of data breaches and leaks. One often overlooked aspect of this risk is the role that lost and stolen computers play in compromising sensitive information. According to  Forrester Research’s 2023 State of Data Security  report, only 7% of security decision makers are concerned about a lost or stolen asset causing a breach, even though such incidents account for 17% of breaches. Such assets can include smartphones, tablets, laptops, external hard drives, and USB flash drives. While these types of breaches may not command the same attention-grabbing headlines as major cyberattacks, the theft or loss of laptops, desktops, and flash drives poses a very real problem. It underscores the pressing need for endpoint resilience and recovery. The Rising Threat Lost and stolen computers are a growing ...

Kroll Suffers Data Breach: Employee Falls Victim to SIM Swapping Attack

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  Risk and financial advisory solutions provider Kroll on Friday disclosed that one of its employees fell victim to a "highly sophisticated" SIM swapping attack. The incident, which took place on August 19, 2023, targeted the employee's T-Mobile account, the company said. "Specifically, T-Mobile, without any authority from or contact with Kroll or its employee, transferred that employee's phone number to the threat actor's phone at their request," it  said  in an advisory. This enabled the unidentified actor to gain access to certain files containing personal information of bankruptcy claimants in the matters of BlockFi, FTX, and Genesis. SIM swapping (aka SIM splitting or simjacking), while generally a benign process, could be exploited by threat actors to fraudulently activate a SIM card under their control with a victim's phone number. This makes it possible to intercept SMS messages and voice calls and receive MFA-related messages that control ac...