Techcrunch – Network Securitas

June 15, 2017

Inside a Porn-Pimping Spam Botnet

This post was originally published on this siteFor several months I’ve been poking at a decent-sized spam botnet that appears to be used mainly for promoting adult dating sites. Having hit a wall in my research, I decided it might be good to publish what I’ve unearthed so far to see if this dovetails with any other research out there. In late October 2016, an anonymous source shared with KrebsOnSecurity.com a list of nearly 100 URLs that — when loaded into a Firefox browser — each displayed what appeared to be a crude but otherwise effective text-based panel designed to report […]

August 27, 2017

Is Your Mobile Carrier Your Weakest Link?

This post was originally published on this siteMore online services than ever now offer two-step authentication — requiring customers to complete a login using their phone or other mobile device after supplying a username and password. But with so many services relying on your mobile for that second factor, there has never been more riding on the security of your mobile account. Below are some tips to ensure your mobile device (or, more specifically, your mobile carrier) isn’t the weakest link in your security chain. For reasons explored more in The Value of a Hacked Email Account, many people become so preoccupied with securing […]

October 2, 2018

When Security Researchers Pose as Cybercrooks, Who Can Tell the Difference?

This post was originally published on this siteA ridiculous number of companies are exposing some or all of their proprietary and customer data by putting it in the cloud without any kind of authentication needed to read, alter or destroy it. When cybercriminals are the first to discover these missteps, usually the outcome is a demand for money in return for the stolen data. But when these screw-ups are unearthed by security professionals seeking to make a name for themselves, the resulting publicity often can leave the breached organization wishing they’d instead been quietly extorted by anonymous crooks. Last week, […]

October 21, 2019

Avast, NordVPN Breaches Tied to Phantom User Accounts

This post was originally published on this siteAntivirus and security giant Avast and virtual private networking (VPN) software provider NordVPN each today disclosed months-long network intrusions that — while otherwise unrelated — shared a common cause: Forgotten or unknown user accounts that granted remote access to internal systems with little more than a password. Based in the Czech Republic, Avast bills itself as the most popular antivirus vendor on the market, with over 435 million users. In a blog post today, Avast said it detected and addressed a breach lasting between May and October 2019 that appeared to target users […]