The Cloudflare software bug that resulted in the potential leaking of sensitive data remained as the top trending cybercrime event of the past week as researchers continued to investigate and quantify the effects of the incident. In a March 1 blog post, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince described the “Cloudbleed” impact as “potentially massive” and said the bug “had the potential to be much worse” than the initial analysis suggested.
Cloudflare summarized its findings as of March 1:
- Their logs showed no evidence that the bug was maliciously exploited before it was patched.
- The vast majority of Cloudflare customers had no data leaked.
- A review of tens of thousands of pages of leaked data from search engine caches revealed a large number of instances of leaked internal Cloudflare headers and customer cookies, but no instances of passwords, credit card numbers, or health records.
- The review is ongoing.
The bug was first discovered by researcher Tavis Ormandy on February 17. Ormandy wrote that the data leakage may date back to September 22, 2016, and that he was able to find “full HTTPS requests, client IP addresses, full responses, cookies, passwords, keys, data, everything.”
Price said that “the nightmare scenario” would be if a hacker had been aware of the Cloudflare bug and had been able to quietly mine data before the company was notified by Google’s Project Zero team and a patch was issued. “For the last twelve days we’ve been reviewing our logs to see if there’s any evidence to indicate that a hacker was exploiting the bug before it was patched,” Price wrote. “We’ve found nothing so far to indicate that was the case.”
Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:
- Political hacks and fallout continue: The daughter of political consultant Paul Manafort had her iPhone data hacked and a database containing more than 280,000 text messages, many of which shed light on the family’s views of Russia-aligned Ukrainian strongman Viktor Yanukovych and President Donald Trump, have been leaked on a darknet website run by a hacktivist collective. The files appear to have been accessed through a backup of Andrea Manafort’s iPhone stored on a computer or iCloud account. Three Russians were recently charged with treason for allegedly passing secrets to U.S. firm Verisign and other unidentified American companies, which in turn shared them with U.S. intelligence agencies. The charges come after the U.S. has accused Russia of hacking, and Reuters reported the charges may be a signal that Russia “would now take action against forms of cooperation that it previously tolerated.”
- More payment card breaches: Hospitality company Benchmark announced a payment card breach affecting six of its properties, including the hotel front desks of Doral Arrowwood, Eaglewood Resort & Spa, and the Santa Barbara Beach & Golf Resort and the food and beverage locations of The Chattanoogan, Willows Lodge, and Turtle Bay Resort. Niagara-Wheatfield School District officials are warning individuals who purchased tickets to attend a school production of “The Lion King” that there have been several reports of credit card fraud tied to those purchases. The school sold the tickets using the ticket sales platform ShowTix4U; however, a spokesperson said there may have been other ways the credit card information could have become compromised. Touring and transportation company Roberts Hawaii is notifying customers of a payment card breach. Authorities are urging customer of Downeast Credit Union in Belfast to check their account for suspicious activity after the discovery of a skimming device in an ATM at the Down East Credit Union Belfast branch.
- Unauthorized access due to employees and poor security: Vanderbilt University Medical Center is notifying 3,247 patients that their patient files were accessed between May 2015 and December 2016 by two staff members who worked as patient transporters. WVU Medicine University Healthcare is notifying 7,445 patients that their protected health information was compromised due to an employee accessing the data without authorization, and 113 of the patients are victims of identity theft. Chicago Public Schools students had their information potentially compromised due to a Google spreadsheet that did not require a login and included special education students’ personal information.
- Other noteable cybercrime events: Spiral Toys sells an internet-connected teddy bear that allows kids and parents to exchange messages via audio recordings, and more than two million of those messages, as well as more than 800,000 email addresses and bcrypt-hashed passwords, have been potentially compromised due to being stored on a database that wasn’t behind a firewall or password-protected. Singapore’s Ministry of Defence said that a “targeted and carefully planned” attack resulted in a breach of its I-net system. An actor using the name “CrimeAgency” on Twitter claims to have hacked 126 vBulletin-based forums that were using outdated versions of the software. Luxury motorcoach company Hampton Jitney is advising customers to change their passwords after a security breach discovered on Wednesday compromised personal information stored by the company.
SurfWatch Labs collected data on many different companies tied to cybercrime over the past week. Some of those “newly seen” targets, meaning they either appeared in SurfWatch Labs’ data for the first time or else reappeared after being absent for several weeks, are shown in the chart below.
Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week
Several companies have issued breach notification letters related to a malware incident at Aptos, Inc., which provides e-commerce solutions for a number of online stores. The breach at Aptos was discovered in November 2016, and notification by the various companies affected was delayed until recently at the request of law enforcement.
According to a notification from Mrs Prindables:
Mrs Prindables along with a wide range of major retailers, utilizes a third party company named Aptos to operate and maintain the technology for website and telephone orders. On February 6, 2017, Aptos informed us that unauthorized person(s) electronically accessed and placed malware on Aptos’ platform holding information for 40 online retailers, including Mrs Prindables, from approximately February 2016 and ended in December 2016. Aptos has told us that it discovered the breach in November 2016, but was asked by law enforcement investigating the incident to delay notification to allow the investigation to move forward.
Other companies to issue breach notification letters, as noted by databreaches.net, include: AlphaIndustries.com, AtlanticCigar.com, BlueMercury.com, Hue.com, MovieMars.com, Nutrex-Hawaii.com, PegasusLighting.com, PlowandHearth.com, Purdys.com, Runnings.com, Sport-Mart.com, Thiesens.com, VapourBeauty.com, WestMusic.com, and PercussionSource.com.
The breach announcement comes on the heels of a report that found “a steady rise” in online fraud attack rates throughout 2016. The shift in tactics toward card-not-present fraud was expected as increased security associated with the U.S. adoption of EMV technology made card-present fraud less profitable. Fraud does not go away; it only shifts. As SurfWatch Labs Adam Meyer has said, fraud is like a balloon: apply a little pressure to one area and malicious actors quickly expand into an area with less resistance.
However, card-present fraud is still impacting organizations. The past month saw a point-of-sale breach at InterContinental Hotels Group that affected the restaurants and bars of 12 properties and another breach that affected six Benchmark properties. In addition, malware was discovered on the payment systems of Arby’s corporate locations. Nevertheless, SurfWatch Labs cyber threat intelligence data, along with reports from other researchers, clearly shows a continued shift as cybercriminals move to find the sweet spot between difficulty and profit when it comes to payment card fraud — and that increasingly appears to be online.
Share this:
SurfWatch Labs, Inc. 