Tag Archives: Data Breach

You probably aren’t familiar with the name Ata Hakcil. He’s a computer engineering student who recently conducted one of the largest password security surveys currently available.

To conduct his research, he collected a number of username and password “data dumps” from the Dark Web and analyzed the passwords he found there. Hakcil was able to analyze a massive collection of more than a billion passwords, looking for trends and commonalities.

IT Security Professionals have long known that password security is an area of persistent weakness that leaves companies of all shapes and sizes exposed. Hakcil was able to measure and assess just how bad that problem is. What he found was depressing.

The most commonly used password in the collection he analyzed was simply ‘123456,’ which appeared in his dataset more than seven million times. It is the most widely used password in the world. Put another way, a staggering 1 person in 142 was found to have used that simple password. As you might suspect, that is laughably easy for a hacker to guess using the simplest of techniques.

In addition to that, Hakcil discovered that the average password length is 9.48 characters, which isn’t great. Given the password referenced above, is better than you might have guessed.

Other relevant and intriguing statistics culled from this study include things like:

• Only 12 percent of passwords include a special character
• 29 percent of the passwords reviewed used alphabet characters only
• 13 percent used numbers only
• Given the above, fully 42 percent of all the passwords in the dataset were vulnerable to quick “dictionary style” attacks that would allow a hacker to gain access with minimal effort.
• The most common 1000 passwords unearthed by this research accounted for 6.607 percent of the total, which gives hackers a long list of low hanging fruit to work with.
• With the most common 1 million passwords, the hit rate is 36.28 percent. With the most common 10 million passwords, the hit rate is 54 percent. This makes most networks incredibly easy to breach.

If you’re wondering why we keep reading about so many high profile data breaches month after month, the results of this research go a long way toward explaining it, and that’s unfortunate.

Hackers are constantly on the lookout for new ways of causing mayhem and stealing data.

Recently, researchers have unearthed a new technique to be on guard against. A few hackers have begun embedding credit card stealing scripts inside favicon meta data.

If you’re not familiar with the term, you definitely know what a favicon is.

It’s a custom icon used by websites for branding, associated with a specific URL. Although not universal, they are ubiquitous on the web and most companies have them.

While the idea of embedding malicious scripts on websites to steal credit card information is not new, the notion of hiding those scripts in the EXIF files of a company’s favicon to avoid detection is both new and innovative. The new technique was spotted by researchers at Malwarebytes. They discovered the script embedded as described above, and designed to steal credit card data from sites making use of a popular WordPress ecommerce plugin called WooCommerce.

Of course, the script could be modified to attack any other ecommerce platform, so this isn’t a threat that’s unique to those making use of WooCommerce. If you do use that plugin, you should have your IT staff perform a careful check of your system to ensure that you haven’t been compromised. The value of embedding the script here is that most scans don’t include favicon meta data by default. Fortunately, that’s easily fixed. So going forward, as long as you be sure to include it, then your risks should be minimal.

This is by no means the first time hackers have found an unusual point of insertion for the scripts they rely on to cause harm, and it certainly won’t be the last. Just be sure that your IT staff is aware of the issue and stay vigilant.

Claire’s Jewelry and Accessories is the latest company to fall victim to hackers.

According to a recent disclosure made by the company, both the retail giant’s main website, and the website of their subsidiary, Icing, were compromised.

They were hit by what appears to be a Magecart attack.

The company’s disclosure reads in part as follows:

“On Friday, we identified an issue related to our e-commerce platform and took immediate action to investigate and address it. Our investigation identified the unauthorized insertion of code to our e-commerce platform designed to obtain payment card data entered by customers during the checkout process. We removed that code and have taken additional measures to reinforce the security of our platform.

We are working diligently to determine the transactions that were involved so that we can notify those individuals. Cards used in our retail stores were not affected by this issue. We have also notified the payment card networks and law enforcement. It is always advisable for cardholders to monitor their account statements for unauthorized charges.

The payment card network rules generally provide that cardholders are not responsible for unauthorized charges that are timely reported. We regret that this occurred and apologize to our customers for any inconvenience caused”

The attack apparently came just one day after the retailer closed down all of their brick and mortar shops worldwide as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the investigation to this point, the hackers were actively trying to steal customer credit card data between April 30th and June 13th, 2020.

If you or any member of your family has made a purchase on either the Claire’s website or their subsidiary site Icing, be aware that your payment card information may have been compromised. Be sure to alert your credit card issuing company right away, and be on the alert for any suspicious charges that may appear on the card or cards used to make those purchases.