The Washington Post Server Breached! Chinese Hackers Apprehend For This Cyber Attack

The Washington Post Server Hacked! Suspected That Chinese Hackers Are Behind This Cyber Attack 

Last week the story of Chinese eavesdropping on European ministries and diplomats at G20 summit draws the attention of the entire cyber world and made headlines. Yet again another breathtaking issue came in-front where also China found responsible for security breach that effected The Washington Post - the most widely circulated newspaper published in Washington, D.C. Sources reveled that hackers broke into The Washington Post’s servers and gained access to employee user names and passwords. Mandiant, a cyber security contractor that monitors The Washington Post’s networks, said the intrusion was of relatively short duration. The extent of the loss of company data was not immediately clear, still the matter of relief is that the company passwords are stored in encrypted form, hackers in some cases have shown the ability to decode such information. although to avoid any further mishap Washington Post have planned to ask all employees to change their user names and passwords on the assumption that many or all of them may have been compromised. Officials at Washington Post said that they saw no evidence that subscriber information, such as credit cards or home addresses, was accessed by the hackers. Nor was there any sign that the hackers had gained access to The Post’s publishing system, e-mails or sensitive personal information of employees, such as their Social Security numbers. Post officials found that this hack is more-recent than the 2011 one. They also said, began with an intrusion into a server used by The Post’s foreign staff but eventually spread to other company servers before being discovered. “This is an ongoing investigation, but we believe it was a few days at most,” said Post spokeswoman Kris Coratti. 

China not only targeted Washington Post,  If you look at the story of major cyber attacks of this year we will find that the name of China has been involved several times for engaging cyber attacks against several high profile news organization of U.S. including New York Times, NBC and so on. So far Chinese Government have not responded to this issue, also none of Chinese hacker community take the responsibility of this breach. For upcoming updates on this story stay tuned with VOGH. 

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Drupal.org Hacked ! More Than 967,000 Registered User Details Compromised

Drupal.org Hacked ! More Than 967,000 Registered User Details Compromised 

Drupal, one of the most famous and widely used open-source content management framework have fallen victim to cyber criminals. The Drupal Security Team and Infrastructure Team has discovered unauthorized access to account information on the official Drupal website and another site called groups.drupal.org. This security breach has exposed user names, country, and email addresses along with hashed passwords of more than 967,000 registered users on the Drupal.org. But still a matter of relief is that the breach failed to infiltrate the credit card details which was stored on the same server. According to security release unauthorized access was made via third-party software installed on the Drupal.org server infrastructure, and was not the result of a vulnerability within Drupal itself. Drupal team have worked with the vendor to confirm it is a known vulnerability and has been publicly disclosed. They are still investigating and will share more detail when it is appropriate. Upon discovering the files during a security audit, the security team has already shut down the association.drupal.org website to mitigate any possible ongoing security issues related to the files. The Drupal Security Team then began forensic evaluations and discovered that user account information had been accessed via this vulnerability. The suspicious files may have exposed profile information like username, email address, hashed password, and country. In addition to resetting your password on Drupal.org, it is also recommending a number of measures (below) for further protection of your information, including, among others, changing or resetting passwords on other sites where you may use similar passwords. 

As a precautionary measure of the said security breach, Drupal Security Team has reset all Drupal.org account holder passwords and are requiring users to reset their passwords at their next login attempt. A user password can be changed at any time by taking the following steps. 

1. Go to https://drupal.org/user/password 
2. Enter your username or email address. 
3. Check your email and follow the link to enter a new password. It can take up to 15 minutes for the password reset email to arrive. If you do not receive the e-mail within 15 minutes, make sure to check your spam folder as well.

Counter Measures that Drupal has Taken to avoid such mishap is something followed- as attacks on high-profile sites (regardless of the software they are running) are common, Drupal strive to continuously improve the security of all Drupal.org sites. To that end, Drupal have taken the following steps to secure the Drupal.org infrastructure:

• Staff at the OSU Open Source Lab (where Drupal.org is hosted) and the Drupal.org infrastructure teams rebuilt production, staging, and development webheads and GRSEC secure kernels were added to most servers
• Drupal is scanning and have not found any additional malicious or dangerous files and making scanning a routine job in their process
• There are many subsites on Drupal.org including older sites for specific events. Drupal created static archives of those sites.

This security breach of Drupal which affected more than 967,000 users is giving us a remind of the decent history of breach where we have seen a slew of attacks against the following sites: Scribd, Guild Wars 2, Gamigo, Blizzard, Yahoo, LinkedIn, eHarmony, Formspring, Android Forums, Gamigo,  Nvidia,Blizzard, Philips, Zynga, VMWare, Adobe,  Twitter  New York Times, Apple and so on. 

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VMware Confirmed: The Source Code of ESX kernel Was Indeed Stolen By Hackers

VMware Confirmed: The Source Code of ESX kernel Was Indeed Stolen By Hackers

VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure again faced cyber attack. Earlier in this year a hacker named "Hardcore Charlie" had stolen files from its ESX server hypervisor source code has been posted online. In that attack the hacker managed to steal more than 300MB source code of  VMWare products. Here also after 6 months another hacker named Stun (57UN) claiming to be affiliated with hacker collective Anonymous managed to hack the source code of VMware's ESX kernel. Immediately after the breach the hacker tweeted a link to a torrent site hosting the stolen VMkernel source code. In their official blog post VMware director of platform security Iain Mulholland acknowledged the breach on Sunday and confirmed the source code was indeed stolen. But VMware also confirmed that leaked is source code that dates back to 1998-2004 which was previously leaked Hardcore Charlie. VMware also said that it is investigating what actions to take next. The torrent file posted by 57UN is leading to download you the source code of VMware ESX, that is sized almost 2MB. 

In a security note VMware said- "our security team became aware of the public posting of VMware ESX source code dating back to 2004. This source code is related to the source code posted publicly on April 23, 2012. It is possible that more related files will be posted in the future. We take customer security seriously and have engaged our VMware Security Response Center to thoroughly investigate. Ensuring customer security is our top priority. As a matter of best practices with respect to security, VMware strongly encourages all customers to apply the latest product updates and security patches made available for their specific environment. We also recommend customers review our security hardening guides. By applying the combination of the most current product updates and the relevant security patches, we believe our customer environments will be best protected. As is our practice, VMware will continue to assess any further security risks, and will provide recommendations and updates here as appropriate..." VMware also encouraged its customers to view the May 3, 2012 security patch information as a resource.

While talking about source code leak, we want to remind you that couple of months ago this hacker (57UN) stolen the source code of Skype. Also earlier in 2012 another hacker group named  The Lords of Dharmaraja has managed to steal the source code of Norton Symantec. 

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Hacker Steals 3.6 Million South Carolina Social Security No & Also Exposed 387,000 Card Details

Hacker Steals 3.6 Million South Carolina Social Security Number & Also Exposed 387,000 Card Details

The year 2012 is going from bad to worse for the cyber space, as yet another big data breach happened which effected more than 4.7 million residents of South Carolina at risk of identity theft. Anyone who filed a South Carolina tax return in the past 14 years may have had their Social Security number stolen and has been urged by the state government to immediately enroll in consumer protection services. The U.S. Secret Service detected a security breach at the S.C. Department of Revenue on Oct. 10, but it took state officials 10 days to close the attacker’s access and another six days to inform the public that 3.6 million Social Security numbers had been compromised. The attack also exposed 387,000 credit and debit card numbers. The stolen data included other information people file with their tax returns such as names and addresses. Businesses’ taxpayer identification numbers also potentially have been comprised in the attack that is being described as one of the nation’s largest against a state agency. The hacker began accessing the Department of Revenue’s computer system in August, but wasn’t noticed by the Secret Service until October, giving him about two months to gather the data in what is one of the largest computer breaches in the US. Most of the data had not been encrypted, meaning the hacker would not need a key to a secret code to read the stolen data. Revenue director James Etter said none of the Social Security numbers were encrypted and about 16,000 credit card numbers were not encrypted.

“The number of records breached requires an unprecedented, large-scale response by the Department of Revenue, the State of South Carolina and all our citizens,” South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said during a news conference. “We are taking immediate steps to protect the taxpayers of South Carolina, including providing one year of credit monitoring and identity protection to those affected.” 

S.C. Inspector General Patrick Maley said nine agencies had been evaluated thus far, and some corrective action had been taken. There was no overarching security policy within state government, he said. No one at the Revenue Department or within the state’s information technology division has been disciplined over the latest attack.  

While this case of hacking was the largest in US history, it wasn’t the first. On March 30, 2012, officials in Utah discovered that one of their health department servers had been hacked. That time also a large number of Social Security numbers were stolen from the server – including those of children. Here we would like to give you reminder that in the last few months we have been a slew of attacks against the following sites: Adobe, Guild Wars 2, Gamigo, Blizzard, Yahoo, LinkedIn, eHarmony, Formspring, Android Forums, Gamigo,  Nvidia, Blizzard and  Philips. And after this breach Adobe also enlisted its name among those who was fallen victim to cyber criminals in this year. For all the latest on cyber security and hacking related stories; stay tuned with VOGH. 

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Hacker Stolen 300K Student Information From Florida College Computer

Hacker Stolen 300K Student Information From Florida College Computer 

While fighting against the rising amount of cyber threats, the cyber security domain is getting stronger and developed everyday. But till today its not as up-to dated as it should be, and that is why every day the news of security breaches are being spotted in the wild. In the last few months we have been a slew of attacks against the following sites: Guild Wars 2, Gamigo, Blizzard, Yahoo, LinkedIn, eHarmony, Formspring, Android Forums, Gamigo,  Nvidia, Blizzard, Philips and Adobe. And it was the turn for Florida Panhandle College. According to sources, a massive security breach hit the main system of Florida Panhandle college, which effected the records of more than 300,000 students, faculty & other employees. Education officials said that the computer hackers accessed confidential information of staff and students in a massive security breach. A breach that at first involved employees at Northwest Florida State College was much larger than suspected and now potentially involves student records from across the state, state and college officials said. The Department of Education said hackers stole 200,000 records including names, Social Security numbers and birth dates for any student statewide who was eligible for Florida’s popular Bright Futures scholarships for the 2005-06 and 2006-07 school years. 

The hackers also stole more than 3,000 employee records, including some that contained confidential financial information. Some 76,000 records containing personal identification information from students who attended the college was also hacked. “We speculate this was a professional, coordinated attack by one or more hackers,” said Northwest Florida State College President, Ty Handy, in a memo that went out to employees in this week. According to Florida College System Chancellor Randy Hanna in a statement. “While some of the contact information is dated, we will be trying to reach every student whose records may have been captured.” Because of the scope of the breach, Federal Authorities have joined the local and state investigation that got under way last week, confirmed the authority.

The breach occurred sometime between late May and late September. College officials said in a news release that 50 employees to date have reported issues with identity theft, including the college president, faculty and staff. The information has been used to either obtain personal loans or to take out a Home Depot credit card. 

-Source (CBS)

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