Kevin Krause reports: A Nigerian man living in the U.S. on a student visa faces federal wire fraud charges in connection with a sophisticated email phishing scam targeting businesses. Amechi Colvis Amuegbunam, 28, of Lagos, Nigeria, was arrested in Baltimore in August and charged with scamming 17 North Texas companies out of more than $600,000…
Category: Business Sector
Microsoft failed to warn victims of Chinese email hack–former employees
Joseph Menn reports on some poor decision-making by Microsoft that left hacking victims in the dark that their communications had been intercepted: Microsoft Corp experts concluded several years ago that Chinese authorities had hacked into more than a thousand Hotmail email accounts, targeting international leaders of China’s Tibetan and Uighur minorities in particular – but…
Did AVG leave your personal data exposed?
Ian Sherr reports: Ever had a day where you just wanted to shout, “You had one job“? The latest company to earn the rebuke is Netherlands-based antivirus software maker AVG, whose “Web tuneup” add-on for the Google Chrome browser promised to protect you from surfing to unsafe sites on the Internet. It turns out the…
More details emerge on Steam’s Christmas breach; 34,000 impacted
Valve is now apologizing for the Christmas day incident that exposed users’ information to each other almost randomly. Here’s their announcement today: On December 25th, a configuration error resulted in some users seeing Steam Store pages generated for other users. Between 11:50 PST and 13:20 PST store page requests for about 34k users, which contained sensitive…
“Not a creature was stirring” – well, except Chris Vickery
Three Lock Box is a construction escrow agency in Las Vegas. And while the name “lock box” might suggest security, unfortunately, they had a misconfigured MongoDB installation that exposed several million dollars in funds available in over 90 accounts. Chris Vickery uncovered the leaky database and contacted them immediately on December 24th because of concern that an attacker might be…
79 escort sites hacked in past week: ElSurveillance
I’ll admit I sometimes ignore data dumps or hacks if they don’t fit my particular interests in reporting on breaches that impact health data or student data. But occasionally I remind myself that all breaches that expose personal information do need to be taken seriously. Yes, even those, as with the Ashley Madison hack, where some people may feel, “Well,…