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…
Category: Business Sector
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,…
In the spirit of Christmas giving, Steam gives your account details to others
It was around 3:30 this afternoon when I noticed people starting to complain about weirdness on Steam’s site. Attempts to connect to the site often resulted in a landing page in a different language (I didn’t even recognize the language I was seeing when I connected to the site), and if you logged into your…