The Pentagon is informing more than 2 million current and former military members that their personnel records storing sensitive personal information were stolen over a monthslong compromise of one of its networks. The breach is the second one in recent months to expose sensitive government information.

The records, according to one notification letter posted to Reddit, included Social Security numbers, names, addresses, sex, race, and occupational specialty. This last category could be particularly valuable to foreign adversaries because it could help their intelligence agencies in identifying high-value military personnel. Starting last October, hackers gained access to a system operated by the Defense Manpower Data Center, which collates Department of Defense personnel records. The Pentagon says that the breach compromised the records of 2.8 million living individuals.

A potential boon

The incident is the second time a major network breach in recent months has exposed sensitive US government personnel records that criminal groups or foreign adversaries could use. Last month, the ransomware group ShinyHunters claimed it hacked into FBI systems and stole records of thousands of the agency’s current or former employees. Reuters reported the job titles in the records included ones related to investigating China or Russia.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

Old Passwords, Fresh Victims Two cybersecurity firms say a single hacking crew has quietly broken into tens of

Researchers have uncovered a massive breach of Fortinet firewalls that has given Russian-speaking attackers near-unrestricted access to some of the world’s largest and most powerful organizations, including Oracle, Chevron, Lenovo, Federal Express, a NATO defense contractor, and Fortinet itself.

Nearly 74,000 Fortinet devices from more than 21,000 IP addresses in 194 countries have been compromised and their plaintext credentials exposed online, Bob Diachenko, a security researcher and head of SecurityDiscovery.com, said online and in an interview. He said he found the data after gaining access to the attackers’ command-and-control server and other infrastructure. The exposed data also included the industry, revenue, and employee count for each compromised organization.

Exceptional scale, poor opsec

Independent researcher Kevin Beaumont reported that “almost all” of the compromised devices remained online as of Wednesday morning. He went on to say that he has confirmed with multiple organizations found in the attackers’ logs that the credentials are real and current. In many cases, once the threat actors compromised the devices, they went on to access affected organizations’ centralized authentication systems, such as Radius servers and Microsoft Active Directory. The number of compromised devices comprises roughly half of all Internet-facing Fortinet firewalls, based on polling from Shodan.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

Researchers have uncovered a massive breach of Fortinet firewalls that has given Russian-speaking attackers near-unrestricted access to some of the world’s largest and most powerful organizations, including Oracle, Chevron, Lenovo, Federal Express, a NATO defense contractor, and Fortinet itself.

Nearly 74,000 Fortinet devices from more than 21,000 IP addresses in 194 countries have been compromised and their plaintext credentials exposed online, Bob Diachenko, a security researcher and head of SecurityDiscovery.com, said online and in an interview. He said he found the data after gaining access to the attackers’ command-and-control server and other infrastructure. The exposed data also included the industry, revenue, and employee count for each compromised organization.

Exceptional scale, poor opsec

Independent researcher Kevin Beaumont reported that “almost all” of the compromised devices remained online as of Wednesday morning. He went on to say that he has confirmed with multiple organizations found in the attackers’ logs that the credentials are real and current. In many cases, once the threat actors compromised the devices, they went on to access affected organizations’ centralized authentication systems, such as Radius servers and Microsoft Active Directory. The number of compromised devices comprises roughly half of all Internet-facing Fortinet firewalls, based on polling from Shodan.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images