Security News for the Week Ending January 22, 2021
Parler Finds A New Home With Russian Hosting Provider in Belize
“Hello world, is this thing on? With that message Parler’s website is back online. Well at least a one page website is back online. The site is being hosted by Russian-owned DDoS-Guard, a company that apparently also hosts ISIS web sites. Whether the folks who invaded the Capitol earlier this month are going to be willing to post their content on a Russian hosted server is not clear. It is unlikely that their hosting provider would respond to a US subpoena, but whether they would steal the posts for their own purpose is a different question. Credit: Cybernews
Capitol Terrorist Who (Allegedly) Planned to Sell Pelosi’s Laptop to Russian Intelligence Arrested
The amazing amount of video footage from the storming of the Capitol is really making the cops’ lives a lot easier. Riley June Williams, 22, from Pennsylvania, was outed by her former boyfriend. She videoed herself committing the felony and then shared that video. She has now been arrested. She has not been charged with espionage, yet. After the events of January 6th, she changed her phone number, deleted her social media accounts and fled. Her public defender wants her released but the feds say that she is a flight risk. Given she disappeared even before she was charged, that doesn’t seem unreasonable. Credit: WaPo
Parler Data Is Available for Download
If you want to be an amateur detective and you have 70 terabytes or so of free disk space on your computer, you too, can download the data that was scraped from the site during its last few hours of its existence. It is chunked down to 4GB chunks and more of it is being uploaded in real time. This will be examined and reexamined for a long time. Details can be found here.
Malware Bytes Joins Club of Those Hacked by SolarWinds Hacking Team
Malware Bytes joins the long and getting longer list of those folks sucked in by the Solar Winds attackers. In their case, they did not use Solar Winds but were compromised by other techniques used by the Solar Winds attackers. They said the damage was minor and limited to some of their emails. Credit: Cyber News
Trump Pardons Google Engineer Who Stole Self Driving Car Trade Secrets and Took Them to Uber
Anthony Levandowski, the Google Engineer who went to work for Uber’s self driving car division, was pardoned by Trump after being sentenced to 18 months for his theft. I am not sure if the pardon relieves him of the obligation to pay Google the $179 million fine, but it probably does. He took 141,000 files with him and likely advanced Uber’s progress by years. Google settled it’s lawsuit against Waymo in 2018 and paid a multi-hundred-million dollar fine. Curiously, Google is an investor in Uber, so they probably don’t want to hurt them too much. Credit: Cyber News
Breaches Down; Record Count Up
According to Risk Based Security, the NUMBER of breaches reported fell 48% in 2020 compared to 2019, but the number of records exposed was UP by 141% to an amazing 37 BILLION records. We don’t believe that the number of breaches was actually down; likely it is just that a lot of breaches are not being reported. Part of it may be that with other important events like the election and Covid, the media is not covering breaches. In addition, we are seeing some really large breaches. Hacking group Shiny Hunters disclosed 129 million hacked records in just five weeks. Credit: Tech Republic
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