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In November 2017 Hewlitt Packard revealed that nearly 500 of its notebooks dating as far back as 2012 were shipped with a secret keylogger installed. Before the issue was publicly disclosed, HP owned up to the mistake of leaving this tool inside of its laptops, and on Nov. 7 posted device-specific patches for most of the models affected, which can be downloaded.

Hopefully, the tool was already removed from your notebook, as Microsoft bundled those patches into the November Windows update, but if you have any concerns feel free to get in contact.

Security researcher Michael Myng discovered the keylogger when probing the Synaptics touchpad software on an HP laptop. HP’s security bulletin says the “potential security vulnerability” affects all laptops with “certain versions of Synaptics touchpad drivers”— not necessarily just HP models. The keylogger is disabled by default, however.

“A party would need administrative privileges in order to take advantage of the vulnerability,” the bulletin states. “Neither Synaptics nor HP has access to customer data as a result of this issue.” HP told Myng that the keylogger was a debugging tool.

The same security bulletin includes separate software updates for every HP laptop loaded with the keylogger, and HP says you should install those updates “as soon as possible.”

For the original article please go here.

Uber is known for pushing the limits of the law and has dozens of lawsuits pending against it, but this one went too far and now comes the reckoning.

Bloomberg was first to report that hackers stole the personal data of 57 million customers and drivers from Uber, a massive breach that the company concealed for more than a year. Recently, they fired their chief security officer and one of his deputies for their roles in keeping the hack under wraps, which included a $100,000 payment to the attackers to "delete the data". Yeah, sure!

 

Victim Of A Simple Credentials Phishing Attack?

Here’s how the press describes the hack: Two attackers accessed a private GitHub coding site used by Uber software engineers and then used login credentials they obtained there to access data stored on an Amazon Web Services account that handled computing tasks for the company. From there, the hackers discovered an archive of rider and driver information. Later, they emailed Uber asking for money, according to the company. If you read between the lines, that could very well be a simple credentials spear phishing scheme, done with some crafty social engineering, or perhaps careless developers leaving internal login passwords lying around online.

 

Failure To Disclose

Joe Sullivan, the outgoing security chief, spearheaded the response to the hack last year, a spokesman told Bloomberg. Sullivan, a onetime federal prosecutor who joined Uber in 2015 from Facebook Inc., has been at the center of much of the decision-making that has come back to bite Uber this year.

 

Bloomberg reported last month that the board commissioned an investigation into the activities of Sullivan’s security team. This project, conducted by an outside law firm, discovered the hack and the failure to disclose, Uber said.

 

No doubt regulators will also be asking tough questions about why they were not informed about the breach until this week, and class-action lawsuits... heeeere we come!

 

Uber says it has "not seen evidence of fraud or misuse tied to the incident." Let's hope that they are right, but it is highly unlikely that these records were deleted. It's practically sure they are sold on the dark web or will be. There are many ways that data could be abused by criminals without Uber ever becoming aware.

All organizations would be wise to remember this: SNAFUS are bad, but cover-ups can kill you. You can ask forgiveness for being hacked and handle your disclosure correctly, but many people will find it harder to forgive if you deliberately covered up the truth.

Bitdefender, the home version of our managed antivirus has developed a home network scanner to enable you to check for any dodgy devices on your network, it’s available as a free download.

Bitdefender Home Scanner lets you see all devices connected to your home network. You get an alert every time an unknown device connects to your wi-fi. Which means you can instantly boot out freeloaders and prevent connection slowdowns.

Home Scanner looks for weak passwords, as well as vulnerable or poorly encrypted communications. It correlates the information gathered from your connected devices with online vulnerability databases and gives you a thorough report so you can ensure maximum security for your network.

For more information go to Bitdefenders website here.

With the increasing use of phishing emails, we’d like to draw your attention to how to identify whether the email links you are being asked to click are legitimate. This is done by hovering your cursor / pointer over the link and revealing the domain or destination to where you will be sent. If you look at the final part of the domain before the forward slash (/) you can determine whether you think this link is from the organization referred to in the email. In the example below .cenotehopping makes little sense and indicates the link is not authentic. 

If there is a string of cryptic numbers or an .exe file do not click on the link. Ring the organisation who has sent you the email and verify that the email is legitimate.  As always it is better to be cautious than caught out.

Microsoft offers this information on recognising phishing email messages, links, or phone calls.

PCMAG.COM Neil J. Rubenking - EDITORS CHOICE

The line dividing a simple antivirus utility from a full security suite isn't always clear. Take Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, for example. In addition to every feature you'd expect in an antivirus, it includes a password manager, a hardened browser, a secure deletion utility, a scan for system vulnerabilities, protection against ransomware attacks, and more. However, it doesn't offer a firewall, spam filtering, or parental control, among other features you get with Bitdefender's actual suite products. It's an antivirus, with benefits, and it remains an excellent choice if you're seeking malware protection.

Heads-up. There is a new social engineering attack currently being tested in Europe, which means we may see it in the rest of the world very soon.

The bad guys are using malicious WhatsApp ads, which offer a 250-dollar coupon for a well-known retailer, in exchange for a short survey. The invite looks like it comes from a friend on WhatsApp. A similar strain installs a malware on the phone, which looks like a software update, but steals all the contacts, phone numbers and email addresses - and if they can find any, passwords and banking credentials.

There are different ways to monetise all this phishing data, and it looks like the bad guys have got that down too, from selling the stolen credentials to using the malware to go viral to all the contacts on the phone.

The large retailers have reported hundreds of these attacks to Europe's federal Cyber Crime Unit.