Author Archives: shinohai

Ashley Madison Settles Again

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Ashley Madison has agreed to pay a settlement of 1.6 Million US to the Federal Trade Commission, to settle an investigation into their business practices stemming from last year's hack. The breach was reportedly one of the largest ever investigated by the FTC, affecting 36 million users, leaving Avid Life Media as a shining example of what consumers have come to expect in the dating and social-media universe. Avid Life Media was the parent company of Ashley Madison, and re-branded itself as "Ruby" in April and appointed a new CEO to whitewash its image.

Ruby CEO Rob Segal said in a statement:

“Today’s settlement closes an important chapter on the company’s past and reinforces our commitment to operating with integrity and to building a new future for our members, our team and our company,”

The company came under scrutiny by the FTC when the hack revealed that the majority of the female users on the site were in fact chatbots designed to lure men into paying for a premium messaging service offered to members. The terms of the settlement require Ruby to no longer use chatbots or other such deceptive practices and also must set up a security plan for review.

Ubuntu Crash Reports Allow Remote Code Execution

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A serious security flaw has been discovered in the Ubuntu operating system that allows remote code execution using the Apport crash report tool. Security researcher Donncha O'Caerbhaill, who discovered the flaw, found that by parsing a specially crafted crash file, he could execute arbitrary Python code.

The code first checks if the CrashDB field starts with { indicating the start of a Python dictionary. If found, Apport will call Python’s builtin eval() method with the value of the CrashDB field. eval() executes the passed data as a Python expression which leads to straight forward and reliable Python code execution.

This particular design flaw would allow an attacker to easily takeover a victim's box by convincing them to open a single text file that opens the crash reporter. O'Caerbhaill published a proof of concept to his Github page along with a video demonstrating the exploit, designated CVE-2016-9949, in action.

Yahoo Leaks Again, Up To 1 Billion Affected!

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Yahoo has announced yet another breach of their email systems, affecting over 1 billion users and possibly exposing data "including phone numbers, birth dates and security questions" which occurred in 2013 and is separate from the incident that was announced in September of this year. News of the latest hack sent Yahoo shares down nearly 3% in after-hours trading and could have implications for their sale to Verizon communications, which has not yet been finalized. Officials believe someone was able to access the code the servers operate on and used the information to forge session cookies.

The announcement in its entirety from Yahoo stated:

"Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has identified data security issues concerning certain Yahoo user accounts. Yahoo has taken steps to secure user accounts and is working closely with law enforcement.

"As Yahoo previously disclosed in November, law enforcement provided the company with data files that a third party claimed was Yahoo user data. The company analyzed this data with the assistance of outside forensic experts and found that it appears to be Yahoo user data. Based on further analysis of this data by the forensic experts, Yahoo believes an unauthorized third party, in August 2013, stole data associated with more than one billion user accounts. The company has not been able to identify the intrusion associated with this theft. Yahoo believes this incident is likely distinct from the incident the company disclosed on September 22, 2016.

"For potentially affected accounts, the stolen user account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (using MD5) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. The investigation indicates that the stolen information did not include passwords in clear text, payment card data, or bank account information. Payment card data and bank account information are not stored in the system the company believes was affected.

"Yahoo is notifying potentially affected users and has taken steps to secure their accounts, including requiring users to change their passwords. Yahoo has also invalidated unencrypted security questions and answers so that they cannot be used to access an account.

"Separately, Yahoo previously disclosed that its outside forensic experts were investigating the creation of forged cookies that could allow an intruder to access users' accounts without a password. Based on the ongoing investigation, the company believes an unauthorized third party accessed the company's proprietary code to learn how to forge cookies. The outside forensic experts have identified user accounts for which they believe forged cookies were taken or used. Yahoo is notifying the affected account holders, and has invalidated the forged cookies. The company has connected some of this activity to the same state-sponsored actor believed to be responsible for the data theft the company disclosed on September 22, 2016.

"Yahoo encourages users to review all of their online accounts for suspicious activity and to change their passwords and security questions and answers for any other accounts on which they use the same or similar information used for their Yahoo account. The company further recommends that users avoid clicking links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails and that they be cautious of unsolicited communications that ask for personal information. Additionally, Yahoo recommends using Yahoo Account Key, a simple authentication tool that eliminates the need to use a password on Yahooaltogether.

Additional information is available on the Yahoo Account Security Issues FAQs page: https://yahoo.com/security-update.

Ruskies Chase ISIS Out Of Palmyra, ISIS Returns Hours Later

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ISIS retook the ancient city of Palmyra just hours after Russian airstrikes designed to drive them away from the city failed. (archived); ISIS occupied the 2000 year old site for 10 months until early this year, and destroyed many ancient temples and performed executions at the ruin sites. Palmyra is considered a strategic city because it lies along a route serving oil wells.

Yahoo Caulks Another Hole

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Yahoo has reportedly fixed yet another XSS vulnerability in their email service, one which allowed an attacker to read anyone's email without the benefit of login credentials. (archived) The company reportedly paid security researcher Jouko Pynnonen a mere 10,000 US dollars for reporting the bug privately, instead of following the path of Peace and releasing the lulz on the internet at large. The news comes on the heels of Yahoo revealing earlier this year a breach that occurred in 2014 that compromised half a billion user account credentials.

Another Spam Tipping Service Emerges To Fill Invisible Void

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Not learning from the failures of former spam service Changetip a new "tipping" service, CoinTip, has now sprung up on twitter and has reddit hopeful they will expand their services to the platform. The creators of CoinTip are none other than Janom, founder of Japan's Monacoin exchange site. Monacoin briefly was a trendcoin across Japan, and like other ill-fated alts is now barely worth pennies on most exchanges. It is likely that CoinTip will suffer the same fate, being used to spam fractions of a bitcent for worthless content across social media until users realize they don't need third party services to send coins.

Reddit CEO Huffman Takes It Pao, Right In The Kisser

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Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has announced the "Free Speech" platform will now be cracking down on "trolls" and abusive users, following last weeks brouhaha in which he admitted to altering user comments that accused him of pedophilia. The effort will involve closely following user abuse reports, adding more filtering capacity, and suspending or banning users that target others. Plans also include to add more employees to the Trust and Safety team , instead of relying on community based moderation as it has in the past.

Huffman said in a draft of an upcoming blog post that he had been asked by users "to ban r/The_Donald outright", but he had rejected that idea, because "if there is anything about this election that we have learned, it is that there are communities that feel alienated and just want to be heard, and Reddit has always been a place where those voices can be heard." It is unknown whether the "voices being heard" would be further censored by Huffman and reddit staff during the course of publication.

DT Customers Lose Service Due To "Cyber Attack"

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Deutsche Telekom has reportedly been hit with a cyberattack that has caused hundreds of thousand of its customers to be without service since Sunday afternoon. German government and company officials say that approximately 900,000 customers, around 4.5% of it's fixed-line customer base, have been affected by the attack. The company was giving few details as to the nature of the attack, but stated on their website:

"Based on the pattern of errors, it can not be ruled out that the router has been targeted externally, with the result that it can no longer log on to the network"

Some customers believe that the tight-lipped response is due to Deutsche Telekom not knowing the full extent of the issues at hand, and many took to social media to vent as the company's hotline and online customer center were rendered unreachable due to the outages. The only fix suggested by the company on their website at this time was to "try turning the router off, wait 30 seconds, then turn it back on again".

New Reddit CEO Tired Of Being Called A Pedophile

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Cries of "Mah censorship" continue to plague reddit as users gather pitchforks to attack CEO Steve Huffman, aka /u/spez, who admitted to editing comments critical of him after reddit decided to delete the /r/Pizzagate subreddit, which focused on links between Hillary Clinton and a pedophile ring.

Huffman finally owned up to his actions after admin chat logs were leaked. His confession had received -507 votes at the time of this article, and stated:

"I messed with the "fuck u/spez" comments, replacing "spez" with r/the_donald mods for about an hour. It's been a long week here trying to unwind the r/pizzagate stuff," he wrote. "As much as we try to maintain a good relationship with you all, it does get old getting called a pedophile constantly." Huffman added: "Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won't do this again."

Users responded by taking to twitter to voice their anger in a flurry of tweets with the hashtag #FuckUSpez and #spezgate, others calling for an exodus to competing site Voat which became the home of the /r/fatpeoplehate community when former CEO Ellen Pao banned their community in 2015. Users of the r/The_Donald subreddit accused Hoffman of "compromising the entire legal status of Reddit" by diddling with user comments, since it could not be proven that a user had not had his comments modified by one of the administrative users. Hoffman has remained largely silent since his confessional post, making only two other short posts in the past 24 hours.

USG.Navy Loses More Personnel Information

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134,000+ names and social security numbers of Navy personnel were accessed by an unknown individuals, according to a report by the NCIS on Wednesday. HP Enterprise services notified the Navy on October 27th that one of it's employees had their laptop breached, though officials say there is no evidence the liberated data had been misused at this time. The data was part of the Career Waypoints database, which sailors use to submit re-enlistment or Military Occupation Specialty job requests. The Navy has stated it will be offering credit monitoring services for those affected and will contact the affected personnel by phone, email, and post to advise them of their loss.