Adobe data breach more extensive than previously disclosed

 

(Reuters) - Adobe Systems Inc said on Tuesday that the scope of a cyber-security breach disclosed nearly a month ago was far bigger than initially reported, with attackers obtaining data on more than 38 million customer accounts.
The software maker also said that hackers had stolen part of the source code to Photoshop editing software that is widely used by professional photographers.
The company disclosed the breach on October 3, saying attackers took credit card information and other data from nearly 3 million customers' accounts.
Adobe also said that the hackers accessed an undisclosed number of Adobe IDs and encrypted passwords that were stored in a separate database. On Tuesday, it revealed that about 38 million records from that database were stolen.


On October 3, the company also reported that the attackers stole source code to three other products: Acrobat, ColdFusion and ColdFusion Builder.
Adobe spokeswoman Heather Edell said the software maker believes the attackers also obtained access to "many invalid Adobe IDs, inactive Adobe IDs, Adobe IDs with invalid encrypted passwords and test account data."
She said the company is still investigating to determine how much invalid account information was breached and is in the process of notifying affected users.
Even though the company believes the stolen passwords were encrypted, the attackers may have been able to access them in plain text by one of several methods, including breaking the algorithm that Adobe used to scramble them, said Marcus Carey, a security researcher and expert on cyber attacks, who formerly worked as an investigator with the National Security Agency.
They could likely use those passwords to break into other accounts because many people use the same passwords for multiple accounts, he said.
"This is a treasure trove for future attacks," Carey said.
Adobe spokeswoman Heather Edell said that the company was not aware of any unauthorized activity on Adobe accounts as a result of the attack.
Yet Edell said she could not say whether stolen credit cards or passwords had been used to launch follow-on attacks against Adobe customers or conduct other types of cyber crimes.
"Our investigation is still ongoing," she said. "We anticipate the full investigation will take some time to complete."

 

 

Chicago hacker tied to Anonymous given 10 years in prison

 

(Reuters) - A Chicago computer hacker tied to the group known as Anonymous was sentenced on Friday to 10 years in prison for cyber attacks on various government agencies and businesses, including a global intelligence company.
Jeremy Hammond, 28, was handed the maximum term for the December 2011 hacking of Strategic Forecasting Inc, an attack his lawyers contend was driven by concern about the role of private firms in gathering intelligence domestically and abroad.
Prosecutors say the hack of Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, resulted in the theft of 60,000 credit card numbers and records for 860,000 clients, which were then uploaded online. Hammond admitted being behind it in May.
He also admitted to hacking several law enforcement agencies and organizations, including the Arizona Department of Public Safety, releasing personal details of officers as part of an attack by the Anonymous-affiliated group LulzSec.


Hammond's lawyers argued their client should be sentenced to only time he had already served since his March 2012 arrest, portraying him as a political activist and whistleblower.
As part of the Stratfor attack, Hammond's lawyers said he turned over company emails to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, which has since selectively released documents revealing the firm's dealings with clients including Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Coca-Cola Co.
"As a result of the Stratfor hack, some of the dangers of the unregulated private intelligence industry are now known," Hammond said in court.
But Chief Judge Loretta Preska of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan imposed the 10-year term followed by three years of supervised release, citing his "total lack of respect for the law."
"There was certainly nothing high-minded or public spirited about his hacking," Preska said.
The sentence was the maximum allowed under the single charge of conspiracy to engage in computer hacking that Hammond pleaded guilty to in May.
Hammond's sentencing drew more than 250 letters of support from family, friends and activists, including Daniel Ellsberg, the former U.S. military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, the top secret report on the United States' role in the Vietnam War

Exclusive: FBI warns of U.S. government breaches by Anonymous hackers

Exclusive: FBI warns of U.S. government breaches by Anonymous hackers

The word 'password' is pictured on a computer screen in this picture illustration taken in Berlin May 21, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Pawel Kopczynski

(Reuters) - Activist hackers linked to the collective known as Anonymous have secretly accessed U.S. government computers in multiple agencies and stolen sensitive information in a campaign that began almost a year ago, the FBI warned this week.
The hackers exploited a flaw in Adobe Systems Inc's software to launch a rash of electronic break-ins that began last December, then left "back doors" to return to many of the machines as recently as last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a memo seen by Reuters.
The memo, distributed on Thursday, described the attacks as "a widespread problem that should be addressed." It said the breach affected the U.S. Army, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, and perhaps many more agencies.
Investigators are still gathering information on the scope of the cyber campaign, which the authorities believe is continuing. The FBI document tells system administrators what to look for to determine if their systems are compromised.
An FBI spokeswoman declined to elaborate.
According to an internal email from Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz' chief of staff, Kevin Knobloch, the stolen data included personal information on at least 104,000 employees, contractors, family members and others associated with the Department of Energy, along with information on almost 2,0000 bank accounts.
The email, dated October 11, said officials were "very concerned" that loss of the banking information could lead to thieving attempts.


Officials said the hacking was linked to the case of Lauri Love, a British resident indicted on October 28 for allegedly hacking into computers at the Department of Energy, Army, Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Sentencing Commission and elsewhere.
Investigators believe the attacks began when Love and others took advantage of a security flaw in Adobe's ColdFusion software, which is used to build websites.
Adobe spokeswoman Heather Edell said she was not familiar with the FBI report. She added that the company has found that the majority of attacks involving its software have exploited programs that were not updated with the latest security patches.
The Anonymous group is an amorphous collective that conducts multiple hacking campaigns at any time, some with a few participants and some with hundreds. In the past, its members have disrupted eBay's Inc PayPal after it stopped processing donations to the anti-secrecy site Wikileaks. Anonymous has also launched technically more sophisticated attacks against Sony Corp and security firm HBGary Federal.
Some of the breaches and pilfered data in the latest campaign had previously been publicized by people who identify with Anonymous, as part of what the group dubbed "Operation Last Resort."
Among other things, the campaigners said the operation was in retaliation for overzealous prosecution of hackers, including the lengthy penalties sought for Aaron Swartz, a well-known computer programmer and Internet activist who killed himself before a trial over charges that he illegally downloaded academic journal articles from a digital library known as JSTOR.
Despite the earlier disclosures, "the majority of the intrusions have not yet been made publicly known," the FBI wrote. "It is unknown exactly how many systems have been compromised, but it is a widespread problem that should be addressed."

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Google building Spark, a Web-based development tool

The online programming tool, still in its early stages, is for writing Web apps within a Web browser. The open-source tool itself is built with Google's new Dart language.

                               Spark is a Google developer tool for writing Web apps from within a Web browser.

                               (Credit: Francois Beaufort)

Google likes Web apps, but one area where native software remains dominant is programming tools. A Google project called Spark that came to light Thursday could change that.
Spark is a Web-based IDE (integrated development environment) that runs in a browser for developers writing Chrome apps, according to Google's Francois Beaufort, who tracks Chrome developments closely. That means, among other things, that Chromebook coders would have a way to be productive without having to move to a Windows, Mac, or Linux box.
"This is still the very beginning," Beaufort said on Google+. "There's not much we can do for now." 

Intriguingly, Spark is built using Dart, Google's Web programming language that the company hopes will improve upon JavaScript. Google just released Dart 1.0 and now faces the challenge of persuading other browser makers to support it, but Dart programmers can use a utility called dart2js to convert their software into JavaScript. That means Spark should run on any modern browser.
What's a Chrome app? In short, it's a Web app that runs on Chrome. That means it can take advantage of Chrome abilities, such as Native Client, and be distributed through the Chrome Web Store. It's a concept that's somewhat antithetical to the cross-platform philosophy of the open Web, but it brings some order to a chaotic, fast-changing world.
Spark isn't the first such effort. Mozilla toyed with a project called Bespin; other online IDEs include Shiftedit and Cloud9.

Chrome beta disses plug-ins, speeds tapping on Android

Google released a beta of Chrome 32 on Thursday, fulfilling a promise to block many plug-ins and speeding up some tap operations on Android.
And Imgur fans will be eager to know that the new release also brings support for animated WebP images, a feature already added to Google's image format but that had to overcome hurdles before finding a place in Chrome, too. Some advocated for a shift to plain old video, but animated GIFs have attained newfound popularity. Google promises smaller file sizes with animated WebP as an alternative, said Urvang Joshi, the Google programmer who championed animated WebP support for Chrome, in a blog post Thursday.
In September, Google announced that it will ban plug-ins that use the NPAPI technology for interfacing with the browser and giving it extra abilities. The ban doesn't affect Adobe Systems' Flash Player, by far the most widely used plug-in, and will only affect several other widely used plug-ins after a more graceful phase-out period.

On Android, the Chrome 32 beta ditches a 0.3-second delay that bogged down the process of tapping on a link. The delay was necessary to make sure people weren't double-tapping to reformat a Web page for a mobile device. The delay is disabled for Web pages that Chrome judges to be designed specifically for mobile screens -- another incentive for Web developers to adjust to the mobile market.
The new browser also supports the Vibration interface, which lets Web apps buzz your phone the way native apps already can. That's one small step of the laborious process of trying to bring Web apps up to parity with those written directly for Android and iOS apps. 

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Google finishes 2,048-bit security upgrade for Web privacy

 

 

Never again are you going to get a Google Web site whose security certificate is protected with comparatively weak 1,024-bit encryption.
The Net giant has secured all its certificates with 2,048-bit RSA encryption keys or better, Google security engineer Dan Dulay said in a blog post Monday. Certificates are used to set up encrypted communications between a Web server and Web browser.
That means two things. First, traffic will be harder to decrypt since 1,024-bit keys aren't in use at Google anymore. Second, retiring the 1,024-bit keys means the computing industry can retire the technology altogether by declaring such keys untrustworthy. 

Google has been aggressively moving to stronger encryption because of U.S. government surveillance by the National Security Agency. According to documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the agency gathered bulk data off Internet taps, including unencrypted data sent between company data centers on its own network, and actively worked to undermine encryption.
Google said it beat its internal end-of-year deadline for the 2,048-bit move. It's also moved to encrypt its internal data transfer between data centers, a move that Yahoo also is making.
In other words, the Net's technology giants are working actively to make surveillance, authorized or not, significantly harder. 

"Worry in Silicon Valley/Puget Sound: furor over NSA will cost billions cuz foreign customers fear US companies can't guarantee security," tweeted Strobe Talbott, president of analyst firm Brookings Institution, referring to the geographic regions where tech powers such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Twitter, Apple, LinkedIn, and Amazon are located.
There's a lot of work to be done yet, though. Google also supports a standard called "forward secrecy," which uses different keys for different sessions so that decrypting a single message doesn't mean previous messages can likewise be decrypted using the same key. But many other Net giants don't support forward secrecy -- though that's changing, too.