Monday, October 07, 2024

NEWS from Bleeping Computer

 American Water shuts down online services after cyberattack

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  • October 7, 2024
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  • 01:29 PM
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  • 0

Water plant

American Water, the largest publicly traded U.S. water and wastewater utility company, was forced to shut down some of its systems after a Thursday cyberattack.
  • In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), American Water said it has already hired third-party cybersecurity experts to help contain and assess the incident's impact. 
  • It also reported the breach to law enforcement and is now coordinating their efforts in a joint and ongoing investigation.
"The Company has taken and will continue to take steps to protect its systems and data, including disconnecting or deactivating certain of its systems," the 8-K regulatory filing reads.
  • As American Water said in a separate statement on its website, the attack also forced it to shut down its online customer portal service, MyWater, and pause billing services.
However, company spokesperson Ruben Rodriguez told BleepingComputer that there "will be no late charges for customers while these systems are unavailable."
"Our dedicated team of professionals are working around the clock to investigate the nature and scope of the incident," Rodriguez added. "The Company currently believes that none of its water or wastewater facilities or operations have been negatively impacted by this incident."
American Water has over 6,500 employees and provides water and wastewater services to over 14 million people in 14 states and on 18 military installations.
This incident follows a similar one that impacted the water treatment facility of Arkansas City, Kansas, which was forced to switch to manual operations after a weekend cyberattack.
These incidents come after a TLP:AMBER advisory warning Russian-linked cyberattacks targeting the water sector, issued by the Water Information Sharing and Analysis Center (WaterISAC), a nonprofit organization that helps protect water utilities from cyber threats.
For instance, Chinese-backed Volt Typhoon hackers infiltrated the networks of drinking water systems in February, while Iranian threat actors breached a Pennsylvania water facility in November 2023.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has also recently issued guidance to assist water and wastewater systems (WWSs) owners and operators in evaluating their cybersecurity practices and identifying measures to reduce their attack exposure.

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Kansas water plant cyberattack forces switch to manual operations


AT&T, Verizon reportedly hacked to target US govt wiretapping platform

By 
 
  • October 7, 2024
    •  
  • 10:51 AM
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  • 4

Multiple U.S. broadband providers, including Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies, have been breached by a Chinese hacking group tracked as Salt Typhoon, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The purpose of the attack appears to be for intelligence collection as the hackers might have had access to systems used by the U.S. federal government for court-authorized network wiretapping requests.

It is unclear when the intrusion occurred, but WSJ cites people familiar with the matter, saying that "for months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data."

Salt Typhoon is the name that Microsoft gave to this particular China-based threat actor. 
  • Other cybersecurity companies are tracking the adversary as Earth Estries (Trend Micro), FamousSparrow (ESET), Ghost Emperor (Kaspersky), and UNC2286 (Mandiant, now part of Google Cloud).
Capturing sensitive traffic
According to the WSJ, the attack was discovered in recent weeks and is being investigated by the U.S. government and security experts in the private sector.
The impact of the attack - amount and type of observed and exfiltrated data - is still being assessed, people with information about the intrusion told WSJ.

“The hackers appear to have engaged in a vast collection of internet traffic from internet service providers that count businesses large and small, and millions of Americans, as their customers” - Wall Street Journal

Apart from breaching service providers in the U.S. Salt Typhoon may have hacked similar entities in other countries, too.
Salt Typhoon has been active since at least 2019 and is considered a sophisticated hacking group focusing on government entities and telecommunications companies typically in the Southeast Asia region.
Security researchers also found that the threat actor attacked hotels, engineering companies, and law firms in Brazil, Burkina Faso, South Africa, Canada, Israel, France, Guatemala, Lithuania, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.

The hackers usually obtain initial access to the target network by exploiting vulnerabilities, such as the ProxyLogon vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server (CVE-2021-26855, CVE-2021-26857, CVE-2021-26858, and CVE-2021-27065).
In previous attacks attributed to Salt Typhoon/Ghost Emperor, the threat actor used a custom backdoor called SparrowDoor, customized versions of the Mimikatz tool for extracting authentication data, and a Windows kernel-mode rootkit Demodex.

Investigators are still looking for the initial access method for the recent attack. The WSJ says that one avenue being explored is gaining access to Cisco routers responsible for routing internet traffic.
However, a Cisco spokesperson told WSJ that the company was looking into the matter but had received no indication that Cisco networking equipment was involved in the breach.
  • BleepingComputer contacted AT&T about the alleged breach and was told they "are not commenting on the WSJ report." Lumen also declined to comment.
  • Verizon has not responded to our emails, and we will update the story if we receive a reply.
Chinese APT hacking groups have been increasingly targeting U.S. and European networking devices and ISPs in cyberespionage attacks.
In August, cybersecurity researchers at Lumen's Black Lotus Labs disclosed that the Chinese threat actors known as "Volt Typhoon" exploited a zero-day flaw in Versa Director to steal credentials and breach corporate networks. During these attacks, the threat actors breached multiple ISPs and MSPs in the U.S. and India, which is not believed to be related to the recent breaches.
In September, Black Lotus Labs and law enforcement disrupted a massive Chinese botnet named "Raptor Train" that compromised over 260,000 SOHO routers, IP cameras with malware. This botnet was used by the "Flax Typhoon" threat actors for DDoS attacks and as a proxy to launch stealthy attacks on other organizations.
While these attacks have been attributed to different Chinese hacking groups, they are believed to operate under the same umbrella, commonly sharing infrastructure and tools.
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Mozilla A free and open internet shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy




Mozilla
A free and open internet shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy
October 3, 2024

MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA

Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has been a core focus for Mozilla from our founding. How do we ensure creators get paid for their work? How do we prevent huge segments of the world from being priced out of access through paywalls? 
How do we ensure that privacy is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? 
These are significant and enduring questions that have no single answer. But, for right now on the internet of today, a big part of the answer is online advertising.

We started engaging in this space because the way the industry works today is fundamentally broken. It doesn’t put people first, it’s not privacy-respecting, and it’s increasingly anti-competitive. There have to be better options. Mozilla can play a key role in creating these better options not just by advocating for them, but also by actually building them. We can’t just ignore online advertising — it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in online advertising over the past few years.

We have the beginnings of a theory on what fixing it might look like — a mix of different business practices, technology, products, and public policy engagements. And we have started to do work on all of these fronts. It’s been clear to us in recent weeks that what we haven’t done is step back to explain our thinking in the broader context of our advertising efforts. For this, we owe our community an apology for not engaging and communicating our vision effectively. Mozilla is only Mozilla if we share our thinking, engage people along the way, and incorporate that feedback into our efforts to help reform the ecosystem.

We’re going to correct that, starting with this blog post. I want to lay out our thinking about how we plan to shift the world of online advertising in a better direction.

Our theory
As we say in our Manifesto: “…a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical … “ to creating an open, healthy internet. Through that balance, we can have an internet that protects privacy and access, while encouraging a vibrant market that rewards creativity and innovation. But that’s not what we have in online advertising today.

Our theory for improving online advertising requires work across three areas that relate to and build upon one another:

#1 Regulation: Over the years, improving privacy and consumer protection in advertising while enabling competition has been at the core of our policy efforts. From pushing to improve Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals via engaging with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK to advocating for strong protections for universal opt-out mechanisms via state privacy laws in the United States, we have a long history of supporting legislation that puts users in more meaningful control of their data. We recognise that technology can only get us so far and needs to work hand-in-hand with legislation to fix the most egregious practices in the ecosystem. With the upcoming new mandate in the European Commission expected to focus on advertising and the push for a federal privacy legislation in the United States reaching a fever pitch, we intend to build upon this work to continue pushing for better privacy protections.
 
#2 Standards: As a pioneer in shaping internet standards, Mozilla has always played a central role in crafting technical specifications that support an open, competitive, and privacy-respecting web. We are bringing this same expertise and commitment to the advertising space. At the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Mozilla is actively involved in advancing cutting-edge proposals for privacy-preserving advertising. This includes collaborating on Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA) and contributing to the Private Advertising Technology Community Group (PATCG). The goal of this work is to identify legitimate, lawful, and non-harmful use cases and promote a healthy web by developing privacy-respecting technical mechanisms for those use cases. This would make it practical to more strictly limit the most invasive practices like ubiquitous third-party cookies.

#3 Products: Building things is the only way for Mozilla to prove these hypotheses. For years, Mozilla products have supported an advertising business without the privacy-invasive techniques common today by deploying features such as Total Cookie Protection and Enhanced Tracking Protection to protect our users. And we’ll continue to explore ways to add advertiser value while respecting user privacy – including by exploring how we can support other businesses in achieving these goals via Anonym. Our goal is to build a model to demonstrate how ads can sustain a business online while respecting people’s privacy. Laura expands upon our approach in her blog.

We have work underway right now across all three of these areas, with much more to come in the weeks and months ahead.
The way forward — together

> This theory, and the work to test it, will become an increasingly integral part of the discussions we already have underway with regulators and civil society, consumers and developers, and advertisers, publishers and platforms. 
  • We will continue to set up gatherings, share research, and explore new ways to collectively share ideas and move this ahead for all of us – both shaping and being shaped by the ecosystem.

Fixing the problems with online advertising feels like an intractable challenge. Having been fortunate enough to be part of Mozilla for well over a decade, I am excited to tackle this challenge head on. It’s an opportunity for us to bring a whole community — including often divergent voices from advertising, technology, government and civil society — to the table to look for a better way. 
  • Personally, I don’t see a world where online advertising disappears — ads have been a key part of funding creators and publishers in every era from newspapers to radio to television. 
  • However, I can imagine a world where advertising online happens in a way that respects all of us, and where commercial and public interests are in balance. 
  • That’s a world I want to help build.

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