Karim Baratov, a 22-year-old Kazakhstan-borm Canadian citizen has pleaded guilty to hacking charges over his involvement massive 2014 Yahoo data breach that affected over three billion Yahoo accounts.
In March, the US Justice Department charged two Russians which are Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushichim and two other hackers which are Alexsey Belan and Karim Baratov for breaking Yahoo servers in 2014.
Karim was arrested in Toronto at his Ancaster home by the Toronto Police Department in March this year, the other three suspects are still in Russia, unlikely to be extradited.
Last Tuesday, Baratov admitted to helping the Russian spies and pleaded guilty to a total of nine counts in San Francisco as following:
– One count of conspiring to violate the computer Fraud and abuse Act by stealing information from protected computers and causing damage to protected computers.
– Eight counts of aggravated identity theft.
Besides any prison sentence, Baratov has also agreed to pay compensation to the Yahoo victims and a fine up to $2,250,000 (at $250,000 per count).
22-Year-Old Hacker Pleads Guilty to 2014 Yahoo Hack, Admits Helping Russian Intelligence
Karim Baratov, a 22-year-old Kazakhstan-borm Canadian citizen has pleaded guilty to hacking charges over his involvement massive 2014 Yahoo data breach that affected over three billion Yahoo accounts.
In March, the US Justice Department charged two Russians which are Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushichim and two other hackers which are Alexsey Belan and Karim Baratov for breaking Yahoo servers in 2014.
Karim was arrested in Toronto at his Ancaster home by the Toronto Police Department in March this year, the other three suspects are still in Russia, unlikely to be extradited.
Last Tuesday, Baratov admitted to helping the Russian spies and pleaded guilty to a total of nine counts in San Francisco as following:
- One count of conspiring to violate the computer Fraud and abuse Act by stealing information from protected computers and causing damage to protected computers.
- Eight counts of aggravated identity theft.
Besides any prison sentence, Baratov has also agreed to pay compensation to the Yahoo victims and a fine up to $2,250,000 (at $250,000 per count).
Fake WhatsApp On Google Play Store Downloaded By Over 1 Million Android Users
This is another article that shows how much big companies that make so much money to take people security under consideration. Few days ago, cyber criminals took advantage of Google’s official Play Store leak to place a fake Whatsupp application which was downloaded from over 1 million android users.
Dubbed Update WhatsApp Messenger, came from an app developer who pretended to be the actual WhatsApp service with the developer title “WhatsApp Inc.”—the same title the actual WhatsApp messenger uses on Google Play. The biggest question will be, how this app developer was able to use the same title as the legitimate Facebook-owner maker of the messaging client? the answer is very simple: Thank you to the Unicode character space. in other words, the app maker added a Unicode character space after the actual WhatsApp Inc. name, which in computer code reads WhatsApp+Inc%C2%A0. This caracter in the end of WhatsApp Inc. was invisible enough to trick most of the downloaders including Google IT security people.
Google just removed the fake WhatsApp Android app from the official Play Store, but this incident make so many users of the Google Play Store think about the security efforts that Google put on to secure us.
https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/fake-whatsapp-android.html
US Identifies 6 Russian Government Officials Involved In DNC Hack
This week, I want to share this interesting article: The United States Department of Justice has reportedly gathered enough evidence to charge at least six Russian government officials for allegedly playing a role in hacking DNC systems and leaking information during the 2016 presidential race.
Earlier this year, US intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government was behind the hack and expose of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails in order to influence the 2016 presidential election in Donald Trump’s favour.
Now, citing people familiar with the investigation, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that United States federal prosecutors could bring charges against the alleged unnamed Russian officials early next year.
https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/dnc-email-russian-hackers.html
British Hacker Admits Using Mirai Botnet to DDoS Deutsche Telekom
In Germani, a 29-year-old man who named by authorities as “Daniel K.,” was arrested ong the 22nd of February pleaded guilty in the court on Friday to charges related to the hijacking of more than one Million Deutsche Telekom routers.
According to reports in the German press, the cyber attacks powered by the notorious Mirai malware has been pleaded guilty to “attempted computer sabotage.” He was behind the cyber attack that knocked more than 1.25 Million customers of German telecommunications provider Deutsche Telekom offline last November.
According to the German authorities, the attack was especially severe and was carried out to compromise the home routers to enrol them in a network of hijacked devices popularly called Botnet, which is being offered for sale on dark web markets for launching DDoS attacks.
Late last year, Deutsche Telekom’s routers became infected with a modified version of the Mirai malware – infamous IoT malware which scans for insecure routers, cameras, DVRs, and other IoT devices and enslaves them into a botnet network – causing over a million pounds’ worth of damage, the company said at the time.
At the time of his arrest, the suspect faced up to 10 years in prison. He’s due to be sentenced on July 28. The BKA got involved in the investigation as the attack on Deutsche Telekom was deemed to be a threat to the nation’s communication infrastructure.
Bad Rabbit: New Ransomware Attack Rapidly Spreading Across Europe
More than 200 major organizations in Europe, most of them from Russia, Ukrane, Turkey, and Germany were attacked in the past few hours by this new widespread Ransomware.
This new Petya-like targeted ransomware attack that mainly attacks corporate networks called Bad Rabbit.
The attackers are demanding from the victims about $285 dollars to unlock their systems.
The ransomware was spreader through drive-by download attack according to this initial analysis provided by the Kaspersky. It was done by using a fake Adobe Flash players installer to lure the victims in to install malware unwittingly.
According to Kaspersky Lab, the victims had to manually excecute the malware dropper, with provands to be an Adobe Flash installer. The downloads were done from different websites, most of them are news or media websites.
Other researchers at ESET have detected Bad Rabbit malware as ‘Win32/Diskcoder.D’ which is a new Petya Ransomware. It uses DiskCryptor, which is an open source full drive encryption software to encrypt files on infected computers with RSA 2048 keys.
After the successful attack and the network becomes affected, the Ransom note asks the victim to log into a Tor onion website to make a payment, which giving them a 40 hours countdown before the price of decryption goes up.
Researchers are analyzing the Bad Robbit to see if there is anyway to decrypt computers without paying ransomware and how to stop it from spreading further.
https://thehackernews.com/2017/10/bad-rabbit-ransomware-attack.html
Pizza Hut has become the latest household name to suffer a payment card breach.
After the big credit cart breach that we learned about two weeks ago in class which was talking about Target losing millions of US credit cards customers information. Pizza Hat admitted that an email sent to so many affected customers placing orders on the company mobile app or website.
The “temporary security intrusion” resulted in hackers accessing names, addresses, and payment card information ( Card number, Expiration date, and CVV numbers). Until now, the company didn’t say the number of customers were affected.
Another company was not honest enough to inform its customers and it took the leaders more than 2 weeks to inform the customer of the attack which made so many of them very angry.
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/pizza-hut-serves-up-a-slice-data/
Equifax CEO Abruptly Retires Following Data Breach
The CEO and Chairman of Equifax Richard Smith retired suddenly Tuesday after the company’s CEO and Chairman of Equifax, credit-reporting service’s data breach that affected more than 143 million people.
The cmopnay’s board anounced that the retirement is effective and the 57-year old is an ex CEO and Chairman. Richard Smith became the Chairman and the CEO in the year of 2005 after a 22 rears career at General Electric in senior roles. However, He was schedule to appear at the hearing of the Senate Banking Committee next month, according to CNBC.
The breach has launched multiple investigations, including with the Department of Justice in Atlanta and the Federal Trade Commission. The company reported that its Chief Information Officer and Chief Security Officer retired earlier this month.
Hackers gained access to some files in the company’s system last May and were able to define some weak points in the website software according to the company’s consultants. So many unauthorized activities were found since then.
https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/88340-equifax-ceo-abruptly-retires-following-data-breach
Equifax Says Cyberattack May Have Affected 143 Million in the U.S.
One of the three major consumer credit reporting agencies was attacked by hackers who were able to access to more than 134 Million people sensitive information. According to the New York Times, this is the third cybersecurity attack since 2015 and and one of the largest risks to the personal sensitive information.
According to Pamela Dixon, the executive director of the World Privacy Forum which is a nonprofit research group, the chance of having your information leaked is about 50 percents if you have a credit report. That means the hackers were able to have the sensitive information of more that 65 million people who live in the US.
Hackers gained access to some files in the company’s system last May and were able to define some weak points in the website software according to the company’s consultants. So many unauthorized activities were found since then.
The following information were stolen such as names, birth days, addresses, and documents with personal information used in disputes for 182 thousand people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/business/equifax-cyberattack.html
Apple explains Face ID on-stage failure
Apple has lunched recently the new IphoneX with a new future called FaceID to replace the Finger print ID future. Few issues concerning the new facial recognition system have been raised, It became such a debate whether it might make it easier for the authorities or thieves to force a user to unlock their handset and whether it will handle the hijab worn by some Muslim women, among other facewear.
This new Iphone X will be available in November. Journalists at the launch at the company’s Cupertino, California headquarters were shown Face ID working in controlled circumstances.
On Wednesday, Senator Al Franken published a letter he had sent to Apple seeking more information about this new future.
The biggest question at this time how Face ID will impact iPhone users’ privacy and security, and whether the technology will perform equally well on different groups of people,” he wrote.”To offer clarity to the millions of Americans who use your products, I ask that you provide more information on how the company has processed these issues internally, as well as any additional steps that it intends to take to protect its users.”