According to Resecurity president Charles Yoo, Citrix has been the victim of an absolutely epic hack where as much as 10 TB of data might have been stolen. Apparently the hack was focused on assets related to NASA, aerospace contracts, Saudi Arabia’s state oil company and the FBI. And Citrix CSIO Stan Black has written a blog post confirming the attack. Here’s the kicker, the hackers, who are tied to the Iranian government, used a technique called “password spraying” where attackers guess at weak passwords, and then work their way up to bigger attacks once inside. And speaking of being inside, the hackers might have been inside the Citrix network for as much as a decade before swiping all that data.
Yikes.
The FBI is investigating and I am sure given what is known about this hack, heads inside the IT department should (if there is any decency in the world) be rolling as I type this. I say that because it’s one thing to be pwned by hackers. But it’s another thing entirely to be pwned for a decade without anyone noticing. That my friends illustrates that someone inside the Citrix IT department was truly asleep at the switch.
Freedom Mobile Suffers Data Leak….Credit Cards, Email Addresses, And More Exposed
Posted in Commentary with tags Canada, Hacked on May 7, 2019 by itnerdIf you are a Freedom Mobile customer, you might have a very good reason to be concerned about the security of your personal information. According to Tech Crunch, a server belonging to Canada’s fourth largest telco is leaking data:
Security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar found an Elasticsearch server leaking five million logs containing customer data. The server wasn’t protected with a password, allowing anyone to access the data.
Rotem and Locar, who shared their findings exclusively with TechCrunch and published his report at vpnMentor, said it took the cell giant a week to secure the leaking database after first reaching out.
The database is believed to be part of a logging system used by the company to determine errors and glitches in the company’s systems. The database recorded any errors and the plaintext data associated with it, including customer data.
Data seen by TechCrunch reveals customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, dates of birth, customer types, and Freedom Mobile account numbers.
The logs also answers to credit checks filed through Equifax, including details if an application was accepted or rejected — along with the reason why.
We also found full credit card numbers, expiry dates and verification numbers stored in plaintext.
None of the data was encrypted.
This is a #EpicFail on the part of Freedom Mobile. Partially because the server was leaking data, and partially because someone else had to tell Freedom Mobile about it which implies that the company wasn’t on the ball. Now 15000 customers were affected and the server was secured after the researchers told them about it. Though Freedom Mobile all but tossed a company called Apptium who managed the server under the bus for this. No matter. It’s being investigated by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and I hope they dole out the right level of punishment as this sort of thing simply cannot go unpunished.
Leave a comment »