Security News for the Week Ending August 2, 2019
Capital One Breached – 100+ Million Applicants Compromised
Among the data compromised are 140,000 US social security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers. Also in the mix were one million Canadian social security numbers plus names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and incomes.
The data included applicants who applied between 2005 and 2019. Yes, 15 years worth of applicant data, floating around in the cloud. I ask WHY?
The hackers were inside between March and July and the breach was discovered in July. In this case, a U.S. person was identified as the source of the hack and arrested. She is still in jail.
The feds say a configuration error allowed her to access their data which was stored in the cloud. See more information at The Register.
Florida Senator Admits He Hasn’t Read the Report on Russian Hacking of Florida’s Election Systems
After the Republican controlled Senate Intelligence Committee released the first volume of it’s report of Russian hacking of the 2016 Presidential elections, Florida Senator and at the time Florida Governor Rick Scott said on national TV that he has not read the report. The report, which is heavily redacted, talks about Russian efforts to hack “State-2” which is widely believed to be Florida.
The report is only 67 pages; much less if you read the redacted version, but Scott has only gotten the Cliff-Notes version from his staff. At the time, Scott was adamant that his state was not hacked. Florida’s other Senator, Marco Rubio, has been working hard to sound the alarm bells on the report. Perhaps the report hit a little to close to Scott’s denials for comfort. Source: The Tampa Bay Times.
Honda Exposes the Family Jewels
134 million rows of sensitive data was accidentally exposed. Wait. Guess. On an unprotected elastic search database.
Information on the company’s security systems, network, technical data on workstations, IP addresses, operating systems and patches were all exposed. Basically, these are directions for even an inexperienced hackers to attack Honda.
Honda is being pretty quiet about this, but it is one more more case of corporate governance gone wrong. Or missing. Source: Silicon Republic.
Apple Suspends Program Of Listening to Siri Recordings
After it was reported last week that Apple had contractors listening to people’s Siri recordings, including sensitive protected health information, Apple announced it was suspending the program and will conduct an investigation. Apple said they will provide an option for people to participate in the program or not, in a future software release. Source: The Guardian.
On Eve of Amazon Getting Awarded $10 Billion DoD Contract, Capital One Happens
Amazon and Microsoft are locked in mortal combat over a $10 billion DoD cloud contract called Jedi. Now the Capital One breach happens exposing information on 100 million customers and it turns out the person who is accused of doing it is a former Amazon tech employee who may have hacked other Amazon customers as well.
So Congress wants some answers – and probably so does Microsoft. $10 billion could be hanging in the balance.
This is a message for cloud customers to ask some hard questions of their cloud vendors, even though this particular attack was helped by a configuration error. Source: Bloomberg.
by 