CYBER SECURITY NEWS – WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2023
Freecycle confirms massive data breach impacting 7 million users
- Freecycle, an online forum dedicated to exchanging used items rather than trashing them, confirmed a massive data breach that affected more than 7 million users.
- The nonprofit organization says it discovered the breach on Wednesday, weeks after a threat actor put the stolen data for sale on a hacking forum on May 30, warning affected people to switch passwords immediately.
- The stolen information includes usernames, User IDs, email addresses, and MD5-hashed passwords, with no other information exposed, according to Freecycle.
- “On August 30th we became aware of a data breach on Freecycle.org. As a result, we are advising all members to change their passwords as soon as possible,” Beal warned in a notification added to the homepage.
Johnson & Johnson discloses IBM data breach impacting patients
- Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems (“Janssen”) has informed its CarePath customers that their sensitive information has been compromised in a third-party data breach involving IBM.
- The investigation revealed that hackers had intermittent access to Forever 21 systems between January and March this year and leveraged this access to steal data.
- CarePath is an application designed to help patients gain access to Janssen medications, offer discounts and cost-saving advice on eligible prescriptions, provides guidance on insurance coverage, and serves drug refiling and administering alerts.
- According to the notice on Janssen’s site, the pharmaceutical firm became aware of a previously undocumented method that could give unauthorized users access to the CarePath database.
Dymocks Booksellers suffers data breach impacting 836k customers
- Dymocks Booksellers is warning customers their personal information was exposed in a data breach after the company’s database was shared on hacking forums.
- The company was informed that its customer data was stolen on September 6th, 2023, by Troy Hunt, the creator of the data breach notification service ‘Have I Been Pwned’ (HIBP), after a threat actor released it on a hacking forum.
- In a notice posted to Dymocks’ website, the book retailer explains that they see no evidence of penetration on its computer systems, and they’re currently investigating a potential security breach on third-party partners.
- As such, how the data was obtained, the duration of unauthorized access, the extent of malicious activity, and the exact scope of the impact of this incident remain unclear.
University of Michigan requires password resets after cyberattack
- On Tuesday, the University of Michigan (UMICH) warned staff and students that they must reset their account passwords after a recent cyberattack.
- Emails sent by the university’s CISO and CIO to community members seen by BleepingComputer ask for password changes by September 12.
- Failure to abide by this mandatory change will lead to the users being unable to sign into their accounts until they go through the much more intricate forgotten password recovery procedure.
Toyota says filled disk storage halted Japan-based factories
- Toyota says a recent disruption of operations in Japan-based production plants was caused by its database servers running out of storage space.
- On August 29th, it was reported that Toyota had to halt operations on 12 of its 14 Japan-based car assembly plants due to an undefined system malfunction.
- In a statement released today on Toyota’s Japanese news portal, the company explains that the malfunction occurred during a planned IT systems maintenance event on August 27th, 2023.
- The planned maintenance was to organize the data and deletion of fragmented data in a database. However, as the storage was filled to capacity before the completion of the tasks, an error occurred, causing the system to shut down.
Coffee Meets Bagel says recent outage caused by destructive cyberattack
- The Coffee Meets Bagel dating platform confirms last week’s outage was caused by hackers breaching the company’s systems and deleting company data.
- Last week, Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB) suffered a worldwide outage, with users upset that they could not coordinate planned dates or continue communicating with their matches.
- Today, CMB confirmed that the outages were caused by their systems being breached and a hacker deleting company data, causing the production servers to no longer operate correctly.
- At this time, Coffee Meets Bagel has not confirmed if the attack was ransomware that encrypted data, effectively making it unusable, or if the threat actors purposely deleted data to bring down the service.