In a letter to their directors, seven agencies are asked to provide Congress with records about their purchases of private data.vTwo top Democrats in the House of Representatives have issued requests to a host of federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, demanding details of alleged purchases of Americans’ personal data. The lawmakers accuse the seven federal agencies of using commercial dealings with data brokers and so-called location aggregators to sidestep warrant requirements in obtaining Americans’ private data.

In a letter addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland and six other agency heads on Tuesday, Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Bennie Thompson said that recent reports had found many law enforcement agencies — “including yours” — had purchased data or direct access to it “instead of obtaining it through statutory authorities, court order, or legal process.”

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Filed: https://gizmodo.com/tech/politics

CRYPTO-GRAM (where crypto means cryptography, not that other stuff)

1. San Francisco Police Want Real-Time Access to Private Surveillance Cameras
2. Facebook Is Now Encrypting Links to Prevent URL Stripping
3. NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware Used against Thailand Pro-Democracy Activists and Leaders
4. Russia Creates Malware False-Flag App
5. Critical Vulnerabilities in GPS Trackers
6. Apple’s Lockdown Mode
7. Securing Open-Source Software
8. New UEFI Rootkit
9. Microsoft Zero-Days Sold and Then Used
10. Ring Gives Videos to Police without a Warrant or User Consent
11. Surveillance of Your Car
12. Drone Deliveries into Prisons
13. SIKE Broken
14. NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards
15. Hacking Starlink
16. A Taxonomy of Access Control
17. Twitter Exposes Personal Information for 5.4 Million Accounts
18. Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Microsoft spotlights the work of Seaborgium, a Russia-based threat actor that has abused OneDrive to phish high-value targets and uses LinkedIn to research them.

Microsoft has warned that a “highly persistent” threat actor from Russia has targeted NATO nations with credential theft campaigns that abuse OneDrive to compromise accounts, steal data and then leak information to sway public opinion.

Dubbed Seaborgium by Microsoft, the group has worked to steal information from targeted NATO countries, particularly the US and UK, and occasionally from other countries in the Baltics, the Nordics, and Eastern Europe, as well as Ukraine government organizations prior to Russia’s February 24 invasion. On occasion, the group also leaked data as part of what seem to be disinformation/misinformation campaigns.

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC), which tracks sophisticated and state-sponsored actors, has focused on Seaborgium ‘s abuse of OneDrive to gain visibility into the group’s activities.

The group has both used OneDrive as a lure in attachments that impersonate the service, and abused OneDrive to host PDFs containing links to malicious URLs.

“The victim is presented with what appears to be a failed preview message, enticing the target to click the link to be directed to the credential-stealing infrastructure. Occasionally, Seaborgium makes use of open redirects within the PDF file to further disguise their operational infrastructure,” says MSTIC in a blogpost.

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Topic: https://www.zdnet.com/topic/security/

RSS: https://www.zdnet.com/topic/security/rss.xml

A Google Cloud Armor customer was hit with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack over the HTTPS protocol that reached 46 million requests per second (RPS), making it the largest ever recorded of its kind.In just two minutes, the attack escalated from 100,000 RPS to a record-breaking 46 million RPS, almost 80% more than the previous record, an HTTPS DDoS of 26 million RPS that Cloudflare mitigated in June.

Assault lasted 69 minutes – The attack started on the morning of June 1, at 09:45 Pacific Time, and targeted the victim’s HTTP/S Load Balancer initially with just 10,000 RPS.

To put into perspective how massive the attack was at its peak, Google says that it was the equivalent of getting all the daily requests to Wikipedia in just 10 seconds.

Luckily, the customer had already deployed the recommended rule from Cloud Armor allowing operations to run normally. The assault ended 69 minutes after it started.

“Presumably the attacker likely determined they were not having the desired impact while incurring significant expenses to execute the attack,” reads a report from Google’s Emil Kiner (Senior Product Manager) and Satya Konduru (Technical Lead)

Another characteristic of the attack is the use of Tor exit nodes to deliver the traffic. Although close to 22% or 1,169 of the sources channeled the requests through the Tor network, they accounted for just 3% of the attack traffic.

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Tagged:

Aug. 18 (UPI) — An Idaho data marketing and analytics company is suing the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, alleging the agency threatened it with a lawsuit over its consumer-tracking capability, according to court documents.”Kochava develops a set of software tools and programs that device application (“app”) developers can use to measure, track, organize, and visualize mobile app data for their marketing campaigns across marketing channels and partners,” according to documents filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho Northern Division.

The FTC had threatened to enforce an injunction against the company over its precise geolocation data. The agency argues the data can be used to track a person’s precise location. The FTC argued that made it possible for third parties to use the location date to track visits to abortion clinics. It also argued users weren’t properly informed of the possibility.

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“Kochava operates consistently and proactively in compliance with all rules and laws, including those specific to privacy,” the company said in a statement to Ars Technica.