Cyber Bites

PewDiePie, the famous Swedish Youtuber, is no stranger to controversy. This time he is in the news again for the wrong reason after a user, who claims to be his fan, released ransomware with a note that reads ‘Subscribe to PewDiePie’. According to The Independent, the ransomware PewCrypt is designed in such a way that it locks people from accessing their data. The ransomware claims that users will not get back their data until PewDiePie...

A Georgia Tech database breach has exposed the personal information of up to 1.3 million current and former faculty members, students, staff and student applicants, according to school officials.Georgia Tech announced yesterday that a central database was accessed by an unknown outside entity through a web application, though it is unclear exactly who was affected . The school, which typically has around 30,000 students enrolled, said it learned of the security breach in “late March.”While...

A white hat hacker reverse engineered 30 mobile financial applications and found sensitive data buried in the underlying code of nearly all apps examined. With this information a hacker could, for example, recover application programming interface (API) keys and use them to attack the vendor’s backend servers and comprise user data, researchers said.The apps in question were all Android and culled from eight sectors including retail banking, healthcare and auto insurance. Companies behind the apps...

Phishing campaigns, some launched as recently as March, aimed at stealing credentials from Verizon mobile customers by spoofing the company's support service.Being mobile-focused and using an identifier for an official service from Verizon is what prompted researchers to categorize it as sophisticated above average.The link delivering the phishing kit includes the abbreviation 'ecrm,' which Verizon uses as a sub-domain - ecrm.verizonwirelesscom - for its Electronic Customer Relationship Management platform. Source: BleepingComputer

Facebook has been caught practicing the worst ever user-verification mechanism that could put the security of its users at risk. Generally, social media or any other online service asks users to confirm a secret code or a unique URL sent to the email address they provided for the account registration. However, Facebook has been found asking some newly-registered users to provide the social network with the passwords to their email accounts, which according to security...

US Secret Service agents arrested a Chinese woman last week at President Trump's private Mar-a-Lago resort. The woman, a Chinese citizen, lied to investigators and had a thumb drive containing malware in her possession at the time of her arrest. According to a criminal complaint filed on Monday, Yujing Zhang, 32, was arrested over the weekend, on March 30. President Trump was at Mar-a-Lago during her arrest but did not meet or interact with her....

If you plan to watch the upcoming final season of Game of Thrones (GoT), you might want to think twice before downloading the show illegally.A study by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab has shown that cybercriminals are actively using pirated content to spread malware, and GoT files are the most at risk. Even though the numbers of users attacked by infected pirated files are declining, the firm said the trend should still give pause: “By dividing...

Overall customer satisfaction is falling, down 2.2 percent, from 94.6 percent in 2013 to 92.5 percent in 2018. But customer expectations continue to increase. Nearly half of customers have expectations higher than they were a year ago. San Francisco, CA-based customer service and engagement platform Zendesk has released its customer experience trends report which is based on industry research and global product usage data from 45,000 customers world-wide, 18,000 of them in the US.Younger generations,...

Global spending on public cloud services are expected to hit $214.3 billion, up 17.5 percent, according Gartner. Software as a service will account for the biggest chunk of spending at $94.8 billion for 2019.Of the various categories of cloud spending, infrastructure as a service will be growing the fastest in 2019, up 27.5 percent to $38.9 billion.Enterprises are generally adopting a cloud-first strategy, but hybrid models still abound. By 2022, Gartner is projecting the total...

According to a new report shared by an IT professional who wants to remain anonymous and tweets from @InfoSecIta, there are more than 26,000 Kibana instances that are currently exposed on the Internet, and unfortunately, most of them are reportedly unprotected.That’s because Kibana does not come with any security baked into it, like session management, though administrators can still manually configure it to use third-party plugins, like Search Guard, to enable authentication."Even if your server...