Category: x.tech

from the retaliatory-animus dept A federal judge has delivered an extraordinary rebuke to the FTC’s Andrew Ferguson, finding that his investigation into Media Matters was motivated by “retaliatory animus” rather than legitimate antitrust concerns. In a scathing ruling, Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan granted Media Matters’ motion for a preliminary injunction, calling out not just the investigation’s pretextual nature, but the systematic pattern of harassment the organization has faced for accurate reporting. Courts almost never find that federal agencies act with…

from the seems-bad dept Here we go again. Whenever policy makers insist that there’s some “nerd harder” solution to tricky societal problems, actual experts have to spend a ridiculous amount of time explaining basic realities to them. Sometimes those are realities about the technology. And sometimes it’s realities about the technology. This time it’s age verification’s turn. Steve Bellovin—one of the most respected security researchers out there, and instrumental in showing why “safe” crypto backdoors can’t exist—just published a short…

Proton has launched ‘Docs in Proton Drive,’ a free and open-source end-to-end encrypted web-based document editing and collaboration tool. Proton is a Swiss company renowned for its privacy-focused services, including Proton VPN, Proton Mail, Proton Pass, Proton Drive, and now also Proton Docs. Recently, the company announced its transition to becoming a non-profit organization to better align with its mission of prioritizing privacy and societal benefit over profit. Launch of Proton Docs Proton says Docs is a compelling, secure, and…

  Four Vietnamese nationals linked to the international cybercrime group FIN9 have been indicted for their involvement in a series of computer intrusions that caused over $71 million in losses to companies in the U.S. The defendants, identified as Ta Van Tai, Nguyen Viet Quoc, Nguyen Trang Xuyen, and Nguyen Van Truong, carried out their cybercrimes from May 2018 until October 2021, stealing both data and funds directly from U.S. organizations. “The FIN9 defendants were prolific international hackers who, for years, allegedly…

The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) has announced that a “cyber incident” forced it to take its corporate systems offline as a precaution. FINTRAC is a government agency in Canada that operates as the country’s financial intelligence unit. It is engaged in money laundering investigations, tracking millions of suspicious transactions annually and making thousands of disclosures about illegal money flows to the police. The agency has published a short press statement on its website stating that…

Blackbaud has settled with the Federal Trade Commission after being charged with poor security and reckless data retention practices, leading to a May 2020 ransomware attack and a data breach affecting millions of people. Blackbaud is a U.S.-based company listed on NASDAQ with operations in multiple countries and a provider of cloud-based donor data management software catering to nonprofit organizations, like charities, education organizations, and healthcare agencies. The FTC’s complaint alleges that the company “failed to monitor attempts by hackers…

At the height of the online file-sharing boom, the phrase ‘Sharing is Caring’ was a reminder that peer-to-peer file-sharing systems lived or died on the availability of upload bandwidth. Its presentation allowed it to be about much more than that. The ‘give to get’ philosophy forms part of the BitTorrent protocol even today, but Sharing is Caring was a phrase that could influence human behavior, to the benefit of the wider file-sharing movement, with no suggestion of pressure. Sharing is…

A 29-year-old man in Ukraine was arrested this week for using hacked accounts to create 1 million virtual servers used to mine $2 million in cryptocurrency.  As announced today by Europol, the suspect is believed to be the mastermind behind a large-scale cryptojacking scheme that involves hijacking cloud computing resources for crypto-mining. By using the computing resources of others’ servers to mine cryptocurrency, the cybercriminals can profit at the expense of the compromised organizations, whose CPU and GPU performance is degraded…

Adult media giant Aylo has blocked access to many of its websites, including PornHub, to visitors from Montana and North Caroline as new age verifications laws go into effect. This move also impacts other adult sites owned by the company, including Tube8, RedTube, and Brazzers. As of January 1st, new age verification laws went into effect in Montana and North Carolina that require adult websites to verify the age of visitors from those states.  Under these new laws, failure to…

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) confirmed that attackers stole the personal information of more than 45,000 individuals after breaching its cloud-based Oracle HCM HR management platform last month. INL is one of 17 U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) national laboratories, and it employs 6,100 researchers and support staff involved in national security and nuclear research. On November 20, it confirmed a “cybersecurity data breach” that impacted its off-site Oracle HCM system one day before. CISA and FBI are looking into…

Valve has reportedly fixed an HTML injection flaw in Counter-Strike 2 that was heavily abused today to inject images into games and obtain other players’ IP addresses. While initially thought to be a more severe Cross Site Scripting (XSS) flaw, which allows JavaScript code to be executed in a client, the bug was determined only to be an HTML injection flaw, allowing the injection of images. Counter-Strike 2 uses Valve’s Panorama UI, a user interface that heavily incorporates CSS, HTML,…

Cold storage and logistics giant Americold has confirmed that over 129,000 employees and their dependents had their personal information stolen in an April attack, later claimed by Cactus ransomware. Americold employs 17,000 people worldwide and operates more than 24 temperature-controlled warehouses across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America. The April network breach led to an outage affecting the company’s operations after Americold forced it to shut down its IT network to contain the breach and “rebuild the impacted systems.” Americold also…

Toyota Financial Services (TFS) is warning customers it suffered a data breach, stating that sensitive personal and financial data was exposed in the attack. Toyota Financial Services, a subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation, is a global entity with a presence in 90% of the markets where Toyota sells its cars, providing auto financing to its customers. Last month, the company confirmed that it detected unauthorized access on some of its systems in Europe and Africa, following a claim from Medusa ransomware about…

Security researchers developed a new attack, which they named AutoSpill, to steal account credentials on Android during the autofill operation. In a presentation at the Black Hat Europe security conference, researchers from the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) at Hyderabad said that their tests showed that most password managers for Android are vulnerable to AutoSpill, even if there is no JavaScript injection. How AutoSpill works Android apps often use WebView controls to render web content, such as login pages within…

Kentucky health system Norton Healthcare has confirmed that a ransomware attack in May exposed personal information belonging to patients, employees, and dependents. Norton Healthcare serves adult and pediatric patients in more than 40 clinics and hospitals across Greater Louisville, Southern Indiana, and the Commonwealth of Kentucky. With over 20,000 employees, more than 1,750 employed medical providers, and over 3,000 total providers on its medical staff, Norton Healthcare is Louisville’s second-largest employer, with more than 140 locations throughout Greater Louisville and…

Academic researchers developed a new side-channel attack called SLAM that exploits hardware features designed to improve security in upcoming CPUs from Intel, AMD, and Arm to obtain the root password hash from the kernel memory. SLAM is a transient execution attack that takes advantage of a memory feature that allows software to use untranslated address bits in 64-bit linear addresses for storing metadata. CPU vendors implement this in different ways and have distinct terms for it. Intel calls it Linear Address Masking…