Brian Krebs reports: Orvis, a Vermont-based retailer that specializes in high-end fly fishing equipment and other sporting goods, leaked hundreds of internal passwords on Pastebin.com for several weeks last month, exposing credentials the company used to manage everything from firewalls and routers to administrator accounts and database servers, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Orvis says the exposure was…
Enhancing the Security of Data Breach Notifications and Settlement Notices
Ryan Amos, Mihir Kshirsagar, Ed Felten, and Arvind Narayanan write: We couldn’t help noticing that the recent Yahoo and Equifax data breach settlement notifications look a lot like phishing emails. The notifications make it hard for users to distinguish real settlement notifications from scams. For example, they direct users to URLs on unfamiliar domains that are not clearly…
Major ASP.NET hosting provider recovering from ransomware attack
Catalin Cimpanu recently reported: SmarterASP.NET, an ASP.NET hosting provider with more than 440,000 customers, was hit yesterday by ransomware. The company is the third major web hosting firm this year that went down because hackers breached their network and encrypted data on customer servers. Read more on ZDNet. In an update yesterday, Duncan Riley reported…
Attempted sextortion leads to call for stricter phone porting rules
Thomas Daigle reports: When Randall Baran-Chong received a notification on his smartphone late one night last week indicating the device was no longer in service, it was the first sign of trouble. […] In the hours that followed, the 33-year-old Toronto businessman says someone locked down his laptop, purchased an Xbox video game gift card…
VA: Purcellville Sorts Data Breach Stemming from 2017 Botched Investigation
This one may be confusing to follow unless you’ve followed some issues involving this town in the past, but have a go at it anyway. Patrick Szabo reports: The Purcellville Town Council held an emergency meeting Saturday afternoon to discuss a “data security incident” related to a flash drive filled with more than 9 gigabytes…
A leak report quietly disappears, leaving questions in its wake
On October 8, Jeremiah Fowler reported that he had discovered a non-password protected database that contained what appeared to be information regarding healthcare workers and traveling nurses. If you had read the report on Security Discovery at the time, you would have read that almost one million people were potentially affected. Based on that reporting,…