Security News for the Week Ending July 30,2021
Internet Rot Causes Porn on Legit Sites
News sites like New York Magazine and others accidentally displayed porn because they had links to the old and now gone Vidme video sharing site. Vidme went out of business in 2017 and a porn site bought the domain. Since there is no easy way for web site operators to detect that a linked site has been sold and since there are billions of old pages out there, you have the making of an embarrassing disaster. Needless to say, the web sites fixed this little bit of rot, but there are millions of other bits of rot lurking. Credit: Wired
Ex eBay Security Boss Sentenced to 18 Months for Cyber-stalking and Witness Tampering
The former global security manager for eBay was sentenced on Tuesday to 18 months in prison and was ordered to pay a $15,000 fine for his role in the cyber-stalking and harassment of a Massachusetts couple who published a newsletter critical of the internet yard sale. Philip Cooke, a former police captain before joining eBay was the last of 7 charged in a scheme to threaten and silence a couple who wrote a blog that was negative about eBay. eBay executives say that they were not aware of the tactics, but…..really? Credit: The Register
9th Circuit Limits Feds’ Confiscation of Electronics at the Border
The 9th Circuit Court (covering Alaska, Arizona, California, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Mariana Islands, Oregon and Washington) ruled that border agents, which until now have had a complete free-for-all with your digital devices, severely limited what a border agent can search for without a warrant. They can ONLY search for digital contraband such as child porn. Under the Trump administration, CBP had a blacklist of reporters, humanitarian workers and lawyers and would regularly seize their phones and laptops under the ruse of Homeland security and copy all of their content. Assume this will wind up at SCOTUS sometime in the next 5-10 years, but in the meantime, this is the law in the western US. Credit The Washington Time
Ransomware Up 93% in Last 6 Months Adding TRIPLE Extortion
In a report, Checkpoint Security says, that overall cyber attacks are up 17% in the US and 36% in EMEA over the first 6 months of the year. But, they say, Ransomware is up 93%, caused by ransomware 3.0. For those not following this, in ransomware 1.0, the crooks just encrypted your data. In ransomware 2.0, they steal it first, then encrypt it and threaten to release it if you have good backups and don’t want to pay. In ransomware 3.0, they steal it and encrypt it, but also try to get your customers, whose data they have stolen, to pay. Credit: Cyber News
DOJ Admits Hackers Got Into Emails of 27 US Attorneys’ Offices
7 months after the SolarWinds Attack was announced, DOJ now says that Russia was able to browse their emails between May and December, including sent, received and stored, and also including attachments. DOJ admits that Russia had access to at least 80% of employees emails in the Eastern, Northern, Southern and Western district of New York. They also got access to emails in California, DC, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey and 6 other states. Credit: Bleeping Computer
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