Terrorist watchlist exposed online
Security researcher Bob Diachenko continued his quest to weed out unsecured data left online. His most recent find came list month, when he discovered an Elasticsearch cluster containing JSON records of 1.9 million people from an apparent watchlist. This included names, citizenship, data of birth, passport details, and no-fly status. The server with the list was indexed by search engines Censys and ZoomEye before being discovered, so it’s likely others have had access. Data fields indicate it could have belonged to the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center. Diachenko reported the server to DHS the day it was discovered, but only went offline three weeks later.
DHS considering using private companies to scan social media
According to a top Department of Homeland Security official, John Cohen, the department is considering hiring private companies to analyze public social media for extremist content, following its failure to identify the signs of a threat ahead of the January 6th Capitol riots. This initiative is currently in a discussion stage and has not received any funding. The legal authority for DHS to do this is also an open question, as “the definition of what is public is not necessarily settled.” Policies on this vary between government agenies, with the FBI needing evidence suggesting criminal activity for more in-depth online searching.
(WSJ)
Reportedly leaked T-Mobile data for sale online
T-Mobile said its investigating a forum post offering to sell social security numbers, phone numbers, names, physical addresses, unique IMEI numbers, and driver licenses information. According to Motherboard’s correspondence with the seller, this contains information on 100 million people, and information came from T-Mobile’s servers. The seller is currently offering a subset of the data, with info on about 30 million people, for $270,000, saying it had a private buyer for the remainder. T-Mobile may be aware of the breach as the seller said they recently cut off access to their servers. Motherboard said the sample data it received came from T-Mobile customers.
(Vice)
Half of US hospitals disconnected networks due to ransomware
According to the Perspectives in Healthcare Security Report from Philips and CyberMDX, 48% of hospitals in the US shutdown access to networks due to the ransomware surge. This represented a mix of those doing so proactively to prevent an attack, and others responding to an ongoing incident. Large hospitals experienced an average downtime of 6.2 hours as a result, while medium-sized ones saw 10 hours of downtime. The cost of the downtime was also more than twice as expensive per-hour for the mid-sized hospitals. 11% of respondants said cybersecurity was a “high priority” for spending. Over half of respondents said they were not protected against severe legacy vulnerabilities like BlueKeep, WannaCry, and NotPetya.
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Microsoft looks to combat piracy with blockchain
According to a new research report from Microsoft, Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University, researchers have developed a system called Argus that will utilize the ethereum blockchain as the “first public anti-piracy system.” The system will allow piracy informers to report things anonymously, while still maintaining a level of transparency since these reports are written on the blockchain. The nature of the system would also make it harder for informers to repeat reports in order to game an incentive system. The researchers also designed Argus to keep transaction cost low, “reduced to an equivalent cost of sending about 14 ETH-transfer transactions.”
(Insider)
Right wing social network shows no signs of moderation
According to research from the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Cyber Policy Center, the social network Gettr, billed as a “no-bias” alternative to Twitter, features virtually no moderation to prevent the sharing of child exploitation images. The researchers only found other users could report content. Most social networks use software like PhotoDNA, which compares uploaded images against a list of child exploitation imagery at the time of upload. Gettr appears to lack any automated moderation. Researchers were able to search for 16 images in the PhotoDNA list of images already uploaded on the site.
(Vice)
Facebook Messenger adds more encryption
Facebook Messenger began rolling out the option for end-to-end encryption on voice and video calls. Text chats have offered encryption through the secret conversation feature since 2016. Like Messenger’s previous encryption efforts, these features are off by default, only encrypted when the “secret conversation” mode is active. The company also said it’s testing end-to-end encryption for group chats and from DMs in Instagram.
Nvidia’s hash rate limiter slightly less limited
Earlier this year, Nvidia released Lite Hash Rate versions of its RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti GPUs, which limited the cards to 50% cryptocurrency mining performance, in the hopes that it would improve supply issues. The latest release of the mining software NBMiner now claims to offer up to 70% mining performance on these cards, although it recommends setting it to 68% for stability. Tom’s Hardware estimates this would give a RTX 3060 Ti the mining performance of a RTX 2070 card.
(TechSpot)