Security News for the Week Ending February 5, 2021
Are You the Victim of Covid Fraud?
As if Covid wasn’t bad enough, there are widespread stories of people getting tax forms for their Covid unemployment benefits -benefits they never applied for and never received, but which are considered taxable income. In California alone, crooks stole at least $11 billion in unemployment benefits by stealing people’s identities and getting the benefits deposited in accounts they control. But the victims will get the tax forms and have to deal with convincing their state and the IRS that they did not get those thousands in income. Credit: Brian Krebs
Paper – Now That’s Secure
Now that the Department of Justice has admitted that (likely) Russia hacked their confidential court filings, exposing search warrants, terrorism investigations and other stuff that should have remained sealed, they have a simple solution. Last week the federal court system issued an order that says that highly sensitive documents (likely those that the court would seal) must be filed on paper and any order or rule of any federal court or judge to the contrary is null and void. Problem solved. Credit: The Register
Billions of Emails/Passwords for Free
Someone has posted a file with 3.2 unique emails and passwords in clear text on a popular hacking forum. This data is a combination of many breaches but is a great input for password stuffing attacks since people love to reuse passwords. For users, this is one more reason to use two factor authentication. Credit: Cybernews
Voting Machine Vendor Smartmatic Sues Fox for $2.7 Bil
Voting machine vendor Smartmatic is suing the Fox network, its hosts individually and Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani for $2.4 billion after these folks made unsubstantiated claims that Smartmatic’s software changed millions of votes from Trump to Biden. Smartmatic says that this is not about the money; they want vindication, so this could get more than a bit nasty. Credit: The Register
T-Mobile is Being Very Aggressive in Deploying 5G
T-Mobile plans to spend $40 billion in the next 3-4 years upgrading its network to 5G and faster 4G. Some of that will be recovered by decommissioning Sprint’s old network. But speed is the issue. Their “low band” 5G is slightly faster than 4G. Their “mid band” might give a couple hundred megabits per second which is quite respectable for cell phones and its “high band” will give you gigabit. But their president of technology says this will take decades to blanket the entire country. For the moment, they appear to be ahead of AT&T and Verizon. Credit: SDX Central
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