Catégorie : Sécurité

By Rohit Bhatia, Mollie Bates, Google Chrome Security There are various threats a user faces when browsing the web. Users may be tricked into sharing sensitive information like their passwords with a misleading or fake website, also called phishing. They may also be led into installing malicious software on their machines, called malware, which can collect personal data and also hold it for ransom. Google Chrome, henceforth called Chrome, enables its users to protect themselves from such threats on the internet. When Chrome users browse the web with Safe Browsing protections, Chrome uses the Safe Browsing service from Google to identify and ward off various threats. Safe Browsing works in different ways depending on the user's preferences. In the most common case, Chrome uses the privacy-conscious Update API (Application Programming…

A class action lawsuit has been filed against big-three consumer credit bureau Experian over reports that the company did little to prevent identity thieves from hijacking consumer accounts. The legal filing cites liberally from an investigation KrebsOnSecurity published in July, which found that identity thieves were able to assume control over existing Experian accounts simply by signing up for new accounts using the victim’s personal information and a different email address. The lawsuit, filed July 28, 2022 in California Central District Court, argues that Experian’s documented practice of allowing the re-registration of existing Experian accounts without first verifying that the existing account holder authorized the changes violates the In July’s Experian, You Have Some Explaining to Do, we heard from two different readers who had security freezes on their credit…

Email scammers sent an Uber to the home of an 80-year-old woman who responded to a well-timed email scam, in a bid to make sure she went to the bank and wired money to the fraudsters.  In this case, the woman figured out she was being scammed before embarking for the bank, but her story is a chilling reminder of how far crooks will go these days to rip people off. Travis Hardaway is a former music teacher turned app developer from Towson, Md. Hardaway said his mother last month replied to an email she received regarding an appliance installation from BestBuy/GeekSquad. Hardaway said the timing of the scam email couldn’t have been worse: His mom’s dishwasher had just died, and she’d paid to have a new one delivered and…

With the recent demise of several popular “proxy” services that let cybercriminals route their malicious traffic through hacked PCs, there is now something of a supply chain crisis gripping the underbelly of the Internet. Compounding the problem, several remaining malware-based proxy services have chosen to block new registrations to avoid swamping their networks with a sudden influx of customers. Last week, a seven-year-old proxy service called 911[.]re abruptly announced it was permanently closing after a cybersecurity breach allowed unknown intruders to trash its servers and delete customer data and backups. 911 was already akin to critical infrastructure for many in the cybercriminal community after its top two competitors — VIP72 and LuxSocks — closed or were shut down by authorities over the past 10 months. The underground cybercrime forums are…

The 911 service as it existed until July 28, 2022. 911[.]re, a proxy service that since 2015 has sold access to hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows computers daily, announced this week that it is shutting down in the wake of a data breach that destroyed key components of its business operations. The abrupt closure comes ten days after KrebsOnSecurity published an in-depth look at 911 and its connections to shady pay-per-install affiliate programs that secretly bundled 911’s proxy software with other titles, including “free” utilities and pirated software. 911[.]re is was one of the original “residential proxy” networks, which allow someone to rent a residential IP address to use as a relay for his/her Internet communications, providing anonymity and the advantage of being perceived as a residential user surfing…

Microleaves, a ten-year-old proxy service that lets customers route their web traffic through millions of Microsoft Windows computers, recently fixed a vulnerability in their website that exposed their entire user database. Microleaves claims its proxy software is installed with user consent, but data exposed in the breach shows the service has a lengthy history of being supplied with new proxies by affiliates incentivized to distribute the software any which way they can — such as by secretly bundling it with other titles. The Microleaves proxy service, which is in the process of being rebranded to Shifter[.[io. Launched in 2013, Microleaves is a service that allows customers to route their Internet traffic through PCs in virtually any country or city around the globe. Microleaves works by changing each customer’s Internet Protocol…

It’s been seven years since the online cheating site AshleyMadison.com was hacked and highly sensitive data about its users posted online. The leak led to the public shaming and extortion of many Ashley Madison users, and to at least two suicides. To date, little is publicly known about the perpetrators or the true motivation for the attack. But a recent review of Ashley Madison mentions across Russian cybercrime forums and far-right underground websites in the months leading up to the hack revealed some previously unreported details that may deserve further scrutiny. As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity on July 19, 2015, a group calling itself the “Impact Team” released data sampled from millions of users, as well as maps of internal company servers, employee network account information, company bank details and…

U.S. state and federal investigators are being inundated with reports from people who’ve lost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in connection with a complex investment scam known as “pig butchering,” wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in cryptocurrency trading platforms that eventually seize any funds when victims try to cash out. The term “pig butchering” refers to a time-tested, heavily scripted, and human-intensive process of using fake profiles on dating apps and social media to lure people into investing in elaborate scams. In a more visceral sense, pig butchering means fattening up a prey before the slaughter. “The fraud is named for the way scammers feed their victims with promises of romance and riches before cutting them off and taking all their money,” the…

Posted by Matthew Mauer and Mike Yu, Android team To help keep Android users’ DNS queries private, Android supports encrypted DNS. In addition to existing support for DNS-over-TLS, Android now supports DNS-over-HTTP/3 which has a number of improvements over DNS-over-TLS. Most network connections begin with a DNS lookup. While transport security may be applied to the connection itself, that DNS lookup has traditionally not been private by default: the base DNS protocol is raw UDP with no encryption. While the internet has migrated to TLS over time, DNS has a bootstrapping problem. Certificate verification relies on the domain of the other party, which requires either DNS itself, or moves the problem to DHCP (which may be maliciously controlled). This issue is mitigated by central resolvers like Google, Cloudflare, OpenDNS and…

The 911 service as it exists today. For the past seven years, an online service known as 911 has sold access to hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows computers daily, allowing customers to route their Internet traffic through PCs in virtually any country or city around the globe — but predominantly in the United States. 911 says its network is made up entirely of users who voluntarily install its “free VPN” software. But new research shows the proxy service has a long history of purchasing installations via shady “pay-per-install” affiliate marketing schemes, some of which 911 operated on its own. 911[.]re is one of the original “residential proxy” networks, which allow someone to rent a residential IP address to use as a relay for his/her Internet communications, providing anonymity and…