Another week, and another Sunday weekly… on Mondays. Even on Easter ? I hope you all had the best time, given the circumstances.
We will start with the easiness to lose your Paypal account if someone does a SIM swapping, that is calling to your mobile line provider and have your number associated with a new SIM card. Then, they can reset your Paypal account password by just receiving an SMS. This was discovered a while ago, and not only with Paypal. Since then, most of the companies have changed this except Paypal. For now, the only way to prevent this is to use a phone number not tied to a SIM card, as a Skype number.
I am no expert in 5G and neither an epidemiologist, but I am sure that burning 5G towers thing that they are causing this COVID-19 crisis will not help in any way. And that is what some people in the UK are doing. Crazy, right? It goes even to harass some mobile network operators. In case you want to read more about 5G networks, with scientific facts and stating what we know today, I strongly recommend this article in Wired Blog.
Last week we mentioned the Marriott data leakage. Still, as said, they had another hack back in 2019, as well as British Airways, and the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has postponed the fines because of the Coronavirus situation. But the essential information here is the amount of the fine: 280 British Pounds Millions. Not a small thing!
On another side of things, we can read in ZDNet that for a reduced time, internet traffic was redirected to go through Russia by just changing the BGP. BGP is the Border Gateway Protocol and is the system used to route internet traffic between internet networks across the globe. The entire system is extremely fragile because any of the participant networks can simply « lie » and publish a BGP route pretending that « Google’s servers » are on their network, and all internet entities will take it as legitimate and send all the Google traffic to the hijacker’s servers. This happened as well last year, but this time with China Telecom.
Zoom was also in the news last week, but this time with some security improvements. They have a long road to go, but at least this is a good start. They have also announced that Alex Stamos, former Facebook’s CSO, will be joining them. Some will say this confirms Zoom’s ties with Facebook. I, on the contrary, think this is a good move since Alex Stamos left Facebook a while ago and has a lot of experience. Mr. Stamos wrote a great post explaining the challenge.
In this context, bad actors are exploiting the COVID-19 as much as they can. For that matter, an advisory from the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was published. It is worth the download at the end of their blog post.
Stay safe!
