Cyber Bites

New Bedford, Massachusetts' refusal to pay a $5.3 million ransom highlights how victim towns and cities may be hitting the limit to what they're willing to spend to speed recovery. Cyber extortionists' ransom demands have surged in recent years, as ransomware cotinues to cripple the operations of manufacturers, hospitals, and — most recently — local governments. Yet those demands may have hit an upper limit. Source: Dark Reading

Tide's method for protecting passwords splinters them up into tiny pieces and stores them on distributed nodes. One method that cryptographers often use to protect a secret is to split it up into multiple smaller pieces and allocate the individual portions for safekeeping to various different parties. It's only when a certain minimum number of those parties bring their portions together that the secret can be reconstructed in its entirety. Source: Dark Reading

The summer school holiday has not ended for students in Flagstaff, Arizona, as a ransomware attack hitting the School District computers forces the decision to cancel classes for today. The schedule for tomorrow is uncertain. All schools are impacted by the incident and there are no after-school activities. The district learned of a "cybersecurity issue" on Wednesday morning. Source: Bleeping Computer

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) asked students not to make hoax threats via social media, emails, or text messages, in a warning published as part of its 'Think Before You Post' campaign. "The FBI takes these threats very seriously whether they come in the form of text messages, social media posts, or emails," said the FBI. "Law enforcement – whether the FBI or our local and state partners – will respond to each...

Server lacked password protection and included multiple databases with records from the U.S., U.K. and Vietnam. Phone numbers linked to the Facebook accounts of hundreds of millions of users has been found online on an insecure server in the latest privacy gaffe for the social media giant. The server, which lacked password protection, contained more than 419 million records over several databases of Facebook users across multiple geographies—including 133 million records of U.S.-based users–according to a...

The cost of breaches will rise by two-thirds over the next five years, exceeding an estimated $5 trillion in 2024, primarily driven by higher fines as more jurisdictions punish companies for lax security. Equifax, $700 million. British Airways, $221 million. Marriott, $120 million. Companies are seeing much heftier fines in 2019, and the near future holds little respite, according to experts. Source: Dark Reading

Researchers find that a spoofing a service message from the phone carrier is simple and effective on some brands of Android smartphones. Using text messages with embedded links, security researchers from Check Point Software Technologies recently discovered that spoofing messages from a phone carrier could be used to configure certain features, including e-mail and the directory server, of several brands of Android phones. The attack uses over-the-air (OTA) provisioning messages, a technique used by carriers...

Google yesterday rolled out security patches for the Android mobile operating system but did not include the fix for at least one bug that enables increasing permissions to kernel level. Security flaws that enable privilege escalation can be exploited from a position with limited access to one with elevated access to critical files on the system. In order to utilize this, an attacker should have already compromised the device but have their actions restricted by insufficient permissions....

More than half of the Android mobile phones in use are susceptible to an advanced text-based phishing attack that only requires a cybercriminal make a $10 investment. Check Point researchers found malicious actors using a remote agent to trick phone owners into accepting new phone settings that hand over various levels of control to the attacker. The attack vector is through a process called over-the-air (OTA) provisioning which is used by carriers to deploy network-specific settings to...

In an incident practically ripped from the plot of one of its own stories, the webcomic XKCD reported that user data from its online forum section was found in an exposed database. XKCD, which labels itself a “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” posted in a brief note that portions of its PHPBB user table from its forums showed up in a leaked data collection. The exposed data includes usernames, email addresses, salted and hashed...