Security News Bites for May 2, 2025
4Chan Cesspool is Back Online
4Chan, the cesspool of a website that spews all sorts of hate and garbage, is back. Unfortunately. They have described what happened, loosely. Bottom line was that they were not maintaining their systems and, as a result, they were hacked. Their data and source code was hacked and the rest is history. They claim they are poor as a result of service providers not wanting to do business with them. Credit: The Register
Are You Sharing the Wrong Data With Google?
Between April 2021 and January 2024 Blue Shield of California was sharing information like your insurance plan name, type and group number, city and zip, gender, family size, Blue Shield ID, claims service date, provider, patient name and financial responsibility and find a doctor search criteria and results. They claim it was accidental, but for 4.7 million members, it happened. They are just now reporting this. What are you accidentally sharing with search engines and social media? Are you sharing more than you intended? If you need assistance, please contact us. Credit: Bleeping Computer
Phishing as a Service is Pretty “Affordable”
This is something you want to be unaffordable, but that is not the case. The feds released details of a phishing as a network service they shut down last year. It involved 42,000 domains. Wrap your head about that for a minute. That is why phishing is so hard to stop. The network was used by around 10,000 crooks and impersonated over 200 domains. Credit: Info Security Magazine
NSC Official Says Administration Will Get More Cyber Offensive
As the administration works to gut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a top White House official says that the administration wants to increase the use of offensive cyber attacks to deter attackers. Whether that will actually deter folks like China is unclear and they really have not provided any details as to how they plan to do that. My concern is that clever attackers will compromise computers at, say, some Fortune 500 company or worse some small company in the United States and use them to launch an attack. Then the Geniuses in DC launch a virtual missile attack against a U.S. company. That won’t end well. Credit: The Record
FBI Steps In After Political Swattings
A swatting is when pranksters or criminals call in an emergency to 911 and SWAT comes to your house with automatic weapons drawn. Sometimes, innocent people die. In part, this is because emergency responders are not trained to detect swattings. Now that politicians and high profile (rich) people are regularly getting swatted, the FBI has decided to respond. In some jurisdictions it has gotten so bad that high profile people have secret codewords to exchange with first responders to identify fake swattings. That is pretty bad. But not to worry, FBI Director Kash Patel says his team is holding people accountable. Credit: The Register
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