Man in the Browser Attacks Online Banking Customers

Last week you may remember that Symantec notified pcAnywhere customers of the potential for "Man in the Middle" attacks as a result of their leaked source code. This week a malware testing lab out of Britain,  S21sec, is warning online banking users of "Man in the Browser" or MitB threats. 


The idea behind these two threats, despite the different name, is the same. The user downloads malware accidentally and the application lives in their browser and alters what is seen on the site and where the entered data goes. Some more sophisticated versions will change payment details and amounts to try and cover the malicious activity.

Fortunately, many banks use software that understands a user's patterns and when something out of the norm occurs, the bank will alert the account holder of the activity. 

Read more: UPI.com

Stratfor Breach

New year, new breach investigation. This time hackers claiming to be a part of the "hacktivist" group Anonymous have breached Austin based research company Strategic Forensics. A spokesperson from Anonymous denies this claim and lays blame on a hacker known as “Sabu,” who is closely associated with the LulzSec group.


Strategic Forensics, commonly known as "Stratfor", lost data for about 4,000 clients including passwords, credit card details, and home addresses. 


The hacker or hackers claim they will use the credit card information to make fraudulent donations to charities. Many experts speculate that they will also make efforts to decrypt the passwords and then use them to try and gain access to other accounts held by Stratfor's considerably high-end clientele. Their clients span many big name organizations including U.S. Military, U.S. State Department, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, IBM, and Microsoft employees.


This initial dump of client information is apparently not final blow for Stratfor from Anonymous. The group is planning to release millions of private company emails as well.

For a great article on this breach: Digital Trends -- Stratfor Breach

Cyber Monday Means Loss of Productivity

As Black Friday has come and gone many consumers are excited for Cyber Monday. The only problem? Many Americans who plan to partake in the deals offered online are doing so at work. According to a recent survey done by the staffing firm Adecco,nearly half of American workers (46 percent) plan to make a dent in their holiday shopping during work hours – either through online shopping while at work, shopping on lunch breaks, taking sick days or cutting out a little early periodically. Another similar survey done by Randstad shows that 40% of employees plan to only spend an hour online shopping at work while 1 in 3 plan to spend over 5 hours of their work day shopping online.


The lure of online deals does not only pose a threat to productivity, but it can also expose the corporate network to malware. Malware and spam attacks are often quickly formulated and executed based on current events and popular online happenings. These malicious websites are found as links that are a part of common searches such as "Cyber Monday Deals". 


Since many people will be ordering online the use of online postal tracking will go up as well, because of this hackers will be sending postage and shipping related emails to trick people into downloading malicious attachments. Websense Security Labs cites this type of spam as one of the "Top 5 Malicious Spam Subjects" .


Security Labs has detailed the type of subjects and email contents everyone should be on the lookout for.

• USPS Invoice copy ID46298 (numbers vary)
• FedEx: New Agent File Form, trackid: 1V6ZFZ7FEOHUQ (numbers vary)
• DHL Express Notification for shipment 90176712199 (numbers vary)

The email will look like this:

The moral of the story is to shop at home, be careful, and no matter how good the deal looks, do not suspend judgement to click on a strange looking link. Also remember that shipping companies will never require you to download an email attachment to get information about your packages and if you are still concerned, check their website for accurate and up to date information.

Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development Breached

Client names, social security numbers, email addresses and residential addresses and bank account detail of users of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development claim system. The 1,200 system users were warned that their personal details may have been accessed by a data-stealing worm named W32.QAKBOT.

Symantec defined the W32.QAKBOT as a worm that is capable of keylogging, collecting cookie data, DNS, operating system, private keys from system certificates and URLs. The virus can spread through a computer network, open a back door on a compromised computer that would allow someone to control the machine and keep itself hidden.

Although the problem has been fixed, Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development is hoping people continue to use the system. It has been communicated that all possible steps are being taken to avoid future recurrence.

Sony CEO Apologizes for Data Breach

Last week, Sony announced that 24.6 million names, addresses, e-mails, birth dates, phone numbers, potentially credit cards and other private information from Sony Online Entertainment accounts could have been taken from company servers or from an old database.

Last month,  a hacker attack on the PlayStation Network may have caused the stealing of data from 77 million user accounts.

This totals over 100 million accounts that were potentially compromised.  Each potentially affected customer will get $1 million in identity theft insurance. 

Sony CEO, Howard Stringer, apologized for “inconvenience” and “concern” the data breach has caused. The company is working on restoring full and safe service as soon as possible. Stringer has a lot of brand mending to do as this breach is being referred to as one of the largest Internet security break-ins in history. 

Epsilon Breach Estimated to Cost $4B

The highly publicized data breach of email service provider Epsilon could cost the organization upwards of four billion dollars. This estimate comes from a report done by cyber risk advisory firm CyberFactors, and is dependent on what is done with the data.

               

According to CSO.com

"That figure [$4 billion] could be reached if criminals get hold of the email addresses and successfully exploit them to gather more personal information and carry out a spear-phishing blitz, according to the report. 'However, until such an event takes place and can be directly linked back to this specific breach, the estimate remains theoretical, but certainly possible given the multitude of sites that use email addresses as user IDs,' the report says."

The report goes on further to estimate that the Costs to Epsilon's customers could be $5.5 million each for notification of their customers about the theft, settlements to those customers, legal defense, compliance adjustments and loss of business.

In contrast to this report CEO of Alliance Data Systems, Epsilon's parent company, Ed Heffernan says he sees no meaningful cost or liability stemming from the incident and that they will not see the customer churn that often follows a breach. 

Although Heffernan believes he will not see significant costs as a result of the breach, the widely known act could hold weighty impacts to Epsilon and even Alliance Data’s brand. If Epsilon is lucky, the company has the potential to escape any non-compliance fines, but this does not mean they will be free of detrimental brand impact. Brand losses are approximately 49% of the cost of a data breach and Heffernan may not be taking this into account when he states that the cost will not be meaningful.

If you were a company who needed third party email services, would you want to do business with a company that had more than a million customer records at risk? Probably not.  A tactical data loss prevention strategy may have saved this company, and those customers affected by the breach the trouble this breach has presented.

2011 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report

Verizon recently released their Data Breach Investigations Report.  The report covers approximately 800 data breach cases from 2010.  The review of breaches covers threat agents and actions, how breaches typically occur, and provides statistics on breached organizations.

Below you will find a summary of organizations who have reported breaches in the past year by size. It may be surprising to find that organizations with 11 to 100 employees have reported 436 breaches.

1 to 10	46
11 to 100	436
101 to 1,000	74
1,001 to 10,000	49
10,001 to 100,000	59
Over 100,000	55
Unknown	40

This may not be surprising to you, but the report concludes that 97 percent of the breaches could have been avoided by using simple controls. Do you have the simple controls in place to protect your organization's data? According to the study, organizations should focus mitigation efforts in the following areas:

Marketing Firm's Customer Data Exposed by Hackers

One of the country's largest e-mail marketing firms, Epsilon, reported that on March 30th, “a subset of Epsilon clients’ customer data [was] exposed by an unauthorized entry into Epsilon’s email system."

Epsilon is a subsidiary of Alliance Data Systems and sends over 40 billion emails annually for their clients. These clients include 7 of the top Fortune 10 companies.

Companies whose clients may have been affected by this breach include:

Brookstone

Capital One Financial Corp.

Citigroup 

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

Kroger Co.

Marriott International Inc. 

McKinsey & Co.

New York & Co.

Ritz-Carlton

TiVo Inc.

US Bancorp

Walgreen Co.

The hackers were only able to access names and email addresses, and it is still unknown if the information has been used in any email based attacks aimed at obtaining credit card or social security numbers.

This attack reminds us to be vigilant and skeptical of all unsolicited emails or emails from unknown senders. Keep in mind the following tips next time you check your email:

1. Under no circumstances should anyone respond to an email from an unknown or known party that asks for sensitive personal data. 
2. If you receive an email from an unknown sender, delete it and mark it as spam in your email client. If you receive an email asking for personal or financial information from an organization that you are a customer of, notify their customer service office immediately.
3. Also, do not click on links in email or pop-up messages that may come up after clicking a link in an email that asks for your personal or financial information. 
4. Always use anti-spyware software and a firewall to protect your computer.
5. Never open or download attachments from an email from an unknown sender.

Lost Laptop Exposes 13,000 Oil Spill Victims

According to a BP spokesman the laptop was lost on March 1 by an employee on routine business travel.


The laptop held unencrypted information including the names, Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth of people who filed claims related to the Deepwater Horizon accident that occurred last spring.


"The lost laptop was immediately reported to law enforcement authorities and BP security, but has not been located despite a thorough search," BP said Tuesday. They added that the device was equipped with a tool that would allow them to disable the system under certain circumstances. No further details on the nature of the circumstances that would be required to be met were given.


Unfortunately lost laptops containing sensitive personal data are lost every day, and even more commonly when traveling. In Ponemon's "Billion Dollar Lost Laptop Study" the institution found that of laptops lost 46% contained confidential data, and only 30% of those laptops were encrypted, as shown below. Encryption is not the only method used to protect confidential data on a laptop, but it is one of the most easily implemented and trusted ways to protect your company's and customer's sensitive data.

New York Tourist Credit Card Information Hacked

110,000 credit card numbers of New York City tour patrons have been stolen by hackers using a SQL injection attack. SQL injection attacks are one of the oldest and simplest forms of internet attacks. The hackers were able to access names, addresses, e-mail addresses, credit card numbers with expiration dates and security codes.

The organization, CitySights NY, has begun notifying customers and offering them one year of free credit monitoring as well as a 50% off coupon for a future tour. A spokesperson for CitySights NY’s parent company, Twin America,  says that they are taking steps to improve data security. They have locked down server access and have installed application firewalls.