Weekly Insight Report on Breaches w/e 24th April 2022

An interesting week for the Research Team as they were doing some ad-hoc research for Season 2 BBC Podcast 'The Lazarus Heist'. This is a story of a hacking ring attempting to steal a billion dollars. Check out Season 1, it's a good listen.

Back to breached data, the team saw a bank in Mumbai, which is running a scholarship for children facing “extreme hardship” have a fairly large data breach. The leak consisted of a wide variety of datasets including a lot of personal information salary etc. as well as large amount of physical addresses and names. Hackers don't care who you are.

A member of the team also came across a user distributing 40 million personal mobile numbers, with 4 million associated email addresses. The data file discovered had a filename known as Lakh. We have not been able to verify the source of the breach yet, as soon we do we'll update this description.

Another gambling site which is based on an offshore tax haven in the Dutch Caribbean had been breached. As mentioned, betting companies are rich in datasets including mobile numbers and IP addresses.

Another interesting breach with more than the usual conversations on a forum is FDCServers.net., described as a 'web hosting server solutions for bandwidth intensive applications, websites, media, gaming or e-commerce platforms'. Data types included names, usernames, passwords and phone numbers. This is not a large breach but the team was drawn to the negative chat surrounding this company.

The team also noted that the .ru domains continue to be dumped, and a plethora of industry sectors' domains exposed such as education, adult websites, health, animal, IT, government and financial services.

Okta claimed yesterday that none of their customers were impacted by the Lapsus$ hack three months ago. It depends on how you assess the risk of data and whether you view the exposure of your email address as a risk factor. Over 308,000 email addresses were associated with the hack.

You now need to ask what a hacker can do with an email address and what it means to them. Just type that question into your search engine. Mine came up with this. "If hackers gain access to your email, they could have an open doorway to any number of other devices and accounts. They can use your email to reset other account passwords, gain access to credit information, or even delete accounts, such as social media profiles."

Never underestimate the power of an email address Mr Okta.

Stay safe!

#protectyourprivacy