Facebook accounts hacked, logins for sale

Governments the targets of a quarter of all cyberattacks, Microsoft retracts fix for Windows 2000 bug

Cybersecurity Update – Tune in weekdays at 30 minutes past the hour for the latest cybersecurity news on The Federal Drive with Tom Temin and Jane Norris (6-10 a.m.) and The Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris (3-7 p.m.). Listen live at FederalNewsRadio.com or on the radio at 1500 and 820 AM in the Washington, D.C. metro area.

  • If you want a great deal on a Facebook account a Russian hacker who calls himself “Kirllos” claims he can sell you login credentials for just $25, or $45 if the accounts have more than 10 friends each. ABC News reports that the hacker is believed to have stolen the IDs of 1.5 million Facebook users. If accurate, that means one out of every 300 Facebook users may have been victimized. Kirllos is selling the information on an underground hacker website, according to VeriSign’s iDefense Labs. The cybersecurity company estimates that Kirllos has sold around 700,000 accounts so far, but VeriSign was unable to verify if any of the accounts are legitimate accounts belonging to real Facebook users.
  • Symantec’s new Internet Security Threat Report indicates that just 25 percent of malicious attacks in 2009 targeted a government. Of those, 5 in 10 attacks came from Brazil. Developing countries like India and Vietnam saw a surge in the amount of malicious cyber activity.
  • Microsoft this week will release for a second time a security patch it pulled from distribution last week. One of its 11 Patch Tuesday updates was retracted after the companies cited quality problems with the software. Computerworld reports Microsoft acknowledged that the original patch didn’t repair the underlying security weakness. That was revealed in a blog posting from Microsoft’s Security Response Center last week.

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.