Gas and electricity price concerns are rife at the moment, with spiralling costs and bigger increases waiting down the line. Sadly this makes the subject valuable material for fraudsters, playing into people’s fears with a dash of social engineering to make them worse off than they were previously. Warnings abound of several energy / cost of living-themed scams doing the rounds. Shall we take a look? Identifiers of an attack These attacks target individuals living in countries where oil or electricity prices are a concern. If you have an imminent set of price increases on the horizon, you may ..read more

Uber covered up the 2016 data breach that affected its 57 million customers and drivers. The confession came as part of the settlement between the DOJ (US Department of Justice) and the taxi company, which will see it avoid criminal prosecution. In a press release from the DOJ, Uber “admits that its personnel failed to report the November 2016 data breach to the FTC despite a pending FTC investigation into data security at the company.” If you may recall, cybercriminals breached Uber’s system years ago using stolen credentials. The cybercriminals accessed a private repository of source code wh ..read more

A vulnerability affecting open source e-commerce platform PrestaShop could spell trouble for servers running PrestaShop websites. The 15-year-old organisation’s platform is currently used by around 300,000 shops worldwide. The exploit is very dependent on specific versions in use, so one PrestaShop customer may see different results to another. What’s happening? The exploit has its own CVE, known as CVE-2022-36408, and (from PrestaShop’s security advisory) relates to a “previously unknown vulnerability chain that we are fixing“. PrestaShop goes on to say that: …this issue seems to concern sho ..read more

It wasn’t so long ago that we were wondering what improvements Windows 11 would make in the security stakes. Well, we haven’t had to wait too long to find out. Windows 11 build 22528.1000 and up will tackle one of the more common entry points for network intruders. Namely, trying to prevent the brute forcing of Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) by adding a default RDP lockout policy: @windowsinsider Win11 builds now have a DEFAULT account lockout policy to mitigate RDP and other brute force password vectors. This technique is very commonly used in Human Operated Ransomware and other attacks – th ..read more

Bad news for players of long-time virtual pet management title Neopets. Word is spreading of a compromise claimed to have accessed around 69 million user accounts. This compromise, posted to a hacking forum, is said to include both the database and around 460 MB of compressed source code from Neopets.com. Data claimed to have been taken includes: Usernames Names Email address Date of birth Zip code Date of Birth Gender Country Registration email Considering the young age of many Neopets players, this would be quite bad from a privacy and safety standpoint, if the breach turns out to be genui ..read more

A data compromise situation has impacted Roblox Corporation, the developers of the massive smash-hit video game Roblox. An as-yet unknown attacker has breached an employee account, and is in the process of exposing the data they’ve collected. Nobody knows if they’ve exhausted their newly-plundered treasure trove, or if more leaks will follow. Hacks and compromise: from myth to reality The Roblox player base is young, and naturally enough worried about risks from cheats and account compromise. As a result, Roblox spends a fair amount of time debunking hacking myths. The most well known of these ..read more

WhatsApp boss Will Cathcart is warning users of the popular messaging app to be on their guard after the WhatsApp Security Team discovered bogus apps packing a hidden punch in the form of malware. Outside the safety of the walled garden App stores do whatever they can to try and prevent bogus programs making it onto the storefront. While the majority of apps on legitimate stores are likely safe, rogues do get through. To avoid the hassle of dodging safety checks, malware authors host their infected files elsewhere. If they can draw device owners outside the relative safety of a storefront, the ..read more

Back in March, popular NFT battler Axie Infinity lay at the heart of a huge cryptocurrency theft inflicted on the Ronin network. From the Ronin newsletter: There has been a security breach on the Ronin Network. Earlier today, we discovered that on March 23rd, Sky Mavis’s Ronin validator nodes and Axie DAO validator nodes were compromised resulting in 173,600 Ethereum and 25.5M USDC drained from the Ronin bridge in two transactions. The attacker used hacked private keys in order to forge fake withdrawals. We discovered the attack this morning after a report from a user being unable to withdraw ..read more

Federal government organisations in Brazil may need to reassess their approach to cyberthreats, according to a new report by the country’s Federal Audit Court. It outlines multiple key areas of concern across 29 key areas of risk. One of the biggest problems in the cybercrime section of the report relates to backups. Specifically: The lack of backups when dealing with hacking incidents. Backups in Brazil: An uphill struggle Backups are an essential backstop that can help against several forms of attack, as well as mistakes and mishaps. The most obvious one of those would be ransomware. When ne ..read more

Two insiders and an accomplice were indicted on Tuesday for multiple counts of fraud. According to documents unsealed by the Wester District of Oaklahoma, a grand jury charged Raymond Bradley Pearce (aka Brad Pearce), a former employee of Avaya; Dusti O. Pearce, his wife; and Jason M. Hines (aka Joe Brown, aka Chad Johnson, aka Justin Albaum), a former Avaya authorized reseller, with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and 13 counts of wire fraud. The court also charged the Pearces with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and money laundering. Avaya is a business-to-business (B2B ..read more