Ashley Madison breach raises another red flag on online security

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Ashley Madison's entire business plan is hinged on their ability to securely store customer's information including intimate photographs, personal profiles and chats. The website was recently hacked and 37 million customer's accounts were reportedly taken and hackers are threatening to leak all this information online unless the site is completely shut down.

Ashley Madison is a website and online community that unabashedly encourages people to have extramarital affairs. It is a dating site designed around making it easy to find various attached partners for casual encounters and no-strings attached sex.

Ashley Madison's entire business plan is hinged on their ability to securely store customer's information including intimate photographs,  personal profiles, sexual fantasies and intimate chats. Their homepage boasts a 'Trusted Security Award,' it promises a '100 % Discreet Service,' and is an 'SSL Secured Site.'

Despite this, Ashley Madison was recently hacked and 37 million customer's accounts, mostly from the US and Canada, were reportedly taken and hackers are threatening to leak all this information online unless the website property is closed down. 

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Security issues plaguing Flash cause Google, Mozilla to disable software

Adobe’s Flash software has made powerful enemies throughout the years. One being Steve Jobs, who refused to let Flash be made available on Apple’s devices, and fairly recently, Facebook’s top security executive Alex Stamos called for Adobe to discontinue Flash. Now, old versions of Adobe Flash are being blocked on Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome browsers after discovering that hackers were using a security bug to hack into other people’s computers.

Leaked documents from Hacking Team, an Italian firm that sells digital surveillance tools to governments, showed they were able to exploit a flaw in Flash. Other hackers who caught sight of this document started to use it as well.

Source: MarketWatch

Tesla’s site and Twitter account gets hacked

Hackers seem to have gotten into both Tesla’s website and official Twitter account. Around 5PM ET, tweets showed up on its page that suggest that the site was no longer handled by the company. It doesn’t seem like anything to grave but it was still an unsophisticated prank of sorts. They changed the account name to #RIPPRGANG and they even posted a number and said to call it to get a free car. Their site also seems to have been compromised. Tesla managed to get back control of both accounts.

Although, even Tesla’s founder Elon Musk got his personal account hacked into. That one seems to be in order as well.

Source: The Verge

BlackBerry services and devices proved reliable for hacked Sony employees

BlackBerry's enterprise-grade security enabled Sony executives to continue communicating even when internal systems and landlines went down - Photo by Gadjo C. Sevilla

While Sony Pictures was left reeling from the massive and instrusive hack which revealed a ton of inside information and even saw various movies leaking before they hit theaters, it seems the company relied on BlackBerry devices and services in the wake of the unprecedented hack. Sony apparently dug up old BlackBerry devices after networks and landlines went down in order to communicate and keep the business running.

Reports are sketchy, but it seems that while Sony's internal servers and systems were eviscerated by hackers, older BlackBerry Enterprise Servers were relied on to enable communication on older BlackBerry handsets. BlackBerry, which is attempting a slow but sure resurgence in enterprise, might benefit from this sudden surge in high-profile security breaches. 

Source: ZDNet