This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,743 for Wednesday the 7th of December 2022.
Today's show is entitled, HPR News.
It is the 20th show of some guy on the internet and is about 10 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is news for the community by the community.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
This is the new show, HPR News, starting off with threat analysis, your attack service.
Hacker Soft confirms a server misconfiguration led to 65,000 companies, data leak.
Microsoft misconfigured an Azure Blob storage server causing a major security breach.
Attackers were able to access unauthorized customer data.
SOC radar, a cyber security company, is calling the security breach Blue Blade.
SOC radar discovered the breach on September 24th, 2022.
Microsoft is attempting to downplay the security breach, but the security researcher Kevin
Bumont isn't buying it.
Mr. Bumont suggests that Microsoft dropped the ball on informing its customers and federal regulators
of the security breach in the timely manner.
For our next article,
hidden ads malware affects over 1 million Android users.
After install, the malicious Android apps automatically run without the user knowing or interacting with the app.
That's right, they automatically run after install.
These malicious apps then disguise themselves by changing their icon to the Google Play icon
and renaming themselves to either Google Play or Settings.
The malicious apps quickly create permanent malicious services.
McAfee's mobile research team demonstrates the resilience of the malware by using kill-9
on the service processes.
Formalicious processes generate immediately as if nothing happened.
For our next article...
Well, the undetectable PowerShell backed or disguised as part of Windows Update.
Director of Security Research at Safe Reach.
Tomarbar stated...
The covert self-deployed tool and the associated C2 command seem to be the work of a sophisticated
unknown threat actor who has targeted approximately 100 victims.
Based on a metadata found within the malicious document,
it seems to be a linked-in-based spear-fishing attack,
which ultimately leads to the execution of a PowerShell script via a piece of macro code.
The macro drops update.vbs create a scheduled task pretending to be part of the Windows Update,
which will execute the updateter.vbs script from a fake update folder under slash update
slash local slash Microsoft slash Windows.
Said Tomar. Currently, 32 security vendors in 18 anti-malware engines have flagged the decoy document
and the PowerShell scripts as malicious.
The findings come as Microsoft has taken steps to block Excel forms and visual basic application
macros by default across Office Apps, prompting threat actors to pivot toward alternative delivery methods.
I imagine this is a major issue as out of work environments and school environments where
users slash students share documents on Microsoft Cloud.
If one person gets a hold of the malicious document, then they just spreads like wildfire
across the environment. They'll be linked down in the show notes.
I've turned certain words in the hyperlinks where you can find out more about what steps
Microsoft has taken as well as the alternative delivery methods the attackers are using.
Next up, User Spakes. The great state of Texas has filed a lawsuit against Google claiming that
the tech Bohemeth has taken user biometric data without permission.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claims Google is illegally data harvesting
Texans using features and devices such as Google Photos, Google Assistant, and Nest Hub Max.
All right, I can just imagine this guy sitting somewhere down in Texas on a front porch,
hollering it at his phone with an image of the Google logo and he's drinking from a jar of
moon shine that he just brewed in his truck radiator on his way home from work.
That's how I picture this guy because there's no way in hell. He honestly believes that people
don't know Google is harvesting their data. That you list bullet proof all right.
Whatever you do with that device, whatever sensors that device has on it, cameras,
microphones, the ability to do the fingerprint reading. If it can collect any form of data,
Google has it. Same thing with Apple, same thing with, I don't know, LG, Samsung, you name it.
I also imagine seeing Google's lawyers just planning how this trial will go
and rather than actually showing up for the trial, they just send a pallet of money.
So everything Ken Paxton has to argue the judge would just look over at the pile of money and say,
nope, doesn't add up. Let's pivot back to threat analysis. The next story, millions of patients
compromised in hospital data leak. Nearly three million Illinois's and Wisconsin patients
are caught in a hospital data breach advocate Aurora Health, which operates 27 hospitals said in
the statement. The breach may have exposed information including a patient's medical provider,
type of appointments, medical procedures, date and locations of scheduled appointments,
and IP addresses. The system blamed the breach on the use of pixels. Computer code that collects
information on how a user interacts with their website. Wow, I can't believe this. This computer code
pixels includes products developed by Google and Facebook's parent company meta that make the
collected data accessible to those companies like Aurora Health. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, here in
the United States of America, Google and Facebook are in control of your health care.
Or at least the information surrounding your health care. The health care industry's use of
pixels has come under why criticism from privacy advocates who warned that the technology's use,
violates federal patent and privacy laws. A report published in June by
the market found that many of the countries top ranked hospitals used the meta pixel.
Wow, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know what to tell you. I can't believe it. Our health care
system is so difficult that regular citizens can't get health care. You can't go across state lines
to get better health care if you could even afford it in the first place, right? So they lock you
into a state which limits the amount of health care you can receive, you know, the options of
insurance who can get. So you can't get a cheaper plan from a neighboring state and then they make
it so expensive that you can't even afford it in the first place. On top of that add insult to entry,
they give your data to Facebook. I mean, to stop and think about that, Facebook and Google can
tie your medical records to some account online and these people have no hippo obligations.
They had there are no laws or anything protecting your data once it's in the hands of Facebook.
They have no federal regulation that says how they must house this data, who can have access to it,
nothing. Your data is just raw out there in the hands of Facebook. Meanwhile, everybody's upset
about something on Twitter. You know, I haven't heard one person stop and talk about this, but yet,
you know, apparently the Tesla guy and Twitter that that's worth chatting about.
Let me put it this way, not if, but when Facebook suffers another data breach,
imagine having not only your Facebook account being compromised, but also any medical diagnosis
that you have had any sort of appointments that you've made toward that diagnosis, any sort of
embarrassing health conditions that maybe they're not embarrassing, but they're private.
You don't want it out there and they open like that. All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm
going to leave you with that one that you want because that one was a little bit upsetting to
hear from me personally, but I want to know what you think about that. What do you think about
Google and meta, you know, with air quotes? What do you think about them being in control of your
health care data? I'm some guy on the internet. This is HPR News and I'm signing off.
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