A quick Saturday digest of cybersecurity news articles from other sources.
U.S. Internet Leaked Years of Internal, Customer Emails (5 minute read)
U.S. Internet’s ‘Securence’ email-providing division had a publicly exposed webpage that listed every email of its 6,500 clients. The CEO of the company stated that the exposure was caused by a mistake in an Ansible playbook controlling the nginx config. U.S. Internet has not commented on how long this misconfiguration was in place or why appropriate controls were not in place to detect or prevent the misconfiguration.
Zeus, IcedID malware gangs leader pleads guilty, faces 40 years in prison (3 minute read)
Vyacheslav Penchukov, a leader of the Zeus/IcedID malware groups, has pleaded guilty to cybercrime charges. He was first arrested in 2022 after his involvement in a major theft using Zeus and now faces 40 years in prison. His prosecution is a win against infamous malware operations.
Trove reveals RATs that can pop major OSes, campaigns against offshore and local targets
A cache of stolen documents posted to GitHub appears to reveal how a Chinese infosec vendor named I-Soon offers rent-a-hacker services for Beijing.
The trove appeared on GitHub last week and contains hundreds of documents documenting I-Soon’s activities.
Analysis of the docs by infosec vendor SentinelOne characterizes I-Soon as “a company who competes for low-value hacking contracts from many government agencies.”
SentinelOne and Malwarebytes found I-Soon claims to have developed tools capable of compromising devices running Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. The Android attack code can apparently retrieve and send a user’s entire messaging history from Chinese chat apps, plus Telegram.
The Chinese crew claimed to have cracked government departments in India, Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea, and of having accessed a NATO system.
Other material appears to see I-Soon bid for work in Xinjiang – a province in which Beijing persecutes the Muslim Uyghur population – by claiming to have run anti-terrorist ops in Pakistan and Afghanistan. More…
8 Ways to Find All Accounts Linked to Your Email Address or Phone Number
Find all accounts linked to the email address or your phone with these methods and ensure your data does not get misused online.
Over the course of our long and storied lives online, most of us have signed up for many online accounts, only to have them fall by the wayside, unused forever.
Now, the email address or phone number you surrendered for registration can be misused. It’s best to revisit all your accounts to update your credentials or deactivate them, but it’s not always as easy as hitting the “Find My Account” button.
Here, we list some of the ways you can find all accounts linked to your email address or phone number. More…
iMessage gets a major makeover that puts it on equal footing with Signal
How Kybers and ratcheting are boosting the resiliency of Apple’s messaging app.
iMessage is getting a major makeover that makes it among the two messaging apps most prepared to withstand the coming advent of quantum computing, largely at parity with Signal or arguably incrementally more hardened.
On Wednesday, Apple said messages sent through iMessage will now be protected by two forms of end-to-end encryption (E2EE), whereas before, it had only one. The encryption being added, known as PQ3, is an implementation of a new algorithm called Kyber that, unlike the algorithms iMessage has used until now, can’t be broken with quantum computing. Apple isn’t replacing the older quantum-vulnerable algorithm with PQ3—it’s augmenting it. That means, for the encryption to be broken, an attacker will have to crack both. More…
ChatGPT goes temporarily “insane” with unexpected outputs, spooking users
Reddit user: “It’s not just you, ChatGPT is having a stroke.”
On Tuesday Jan 20, ChatGPT users began reporting unexpected outputs from OpenAI’s AI assistant, flooding the r/ChatGPT Reddit sub with reports of the AI assistant “having a stroke,” “going insane,” “rambling,” and “losing it.” OpenAI acknowledged the problem and fixed it by Wednesday afternoon, but the experience serves as a high-profile example of how some people perceive malfunctioning large language models, which are designed to mimic humanlike output. More…
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About the Author:
I am a cybersecurity and IT instructor, cybersecurity analyst, pen-tester, trainer, and speaker. I am an owner of the WyzCo Group Inc. In addition to consulting on security products and services, I also conduct security audits, compliance audits, vulnerability assessments and penetration tests. I also teach Cybersecurity Awareness Training classes. I work as an information technology and cybersecurity instructor for several training and certification organizations. I have worked in corporate, military, government, and workforce development training environments I am a frequent speaker at professional conferences such as the Minnesota Bloggers Conference, Secure360 Security Conference in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, the (ISC)2 World Congress 2016, and the ISSA International Conference 2017, and many local community organizations, including Chambers of Commerce, SCORE, and several school districts. I have been blogging on cybersecurity since 2006 at http://wyzguyscybersecurity.com