data breach

5 Articles

This Week In Security: F5, SonicWall, And The End Of Windows 10

October 17, 2025 by 12 Comments

F5 is unintentionally dabbling in releasing the source code behind their BIG-IP networking gear, announcing this week that an unknown threat actor had access to their internal vulnerability and code tracking systems. This security breach was discovered on August 9th, and in the time since, F5 has engaged with CrowdStrike, Mandiant, and NCC Group to review what happened.

So far it appears that the worst result is access to unreleased vulnerabilities in the F5 knowledge management system. This means that any unpatched vulnerabilities were effectively 0-days, though the latest set of patches for the BIG-IP system has fixed those flaws. There aren’t any reports of those vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild, and F5 has stated that none of the leaked vulnerabilities were critical or allowed for remote exploitation.

Slightly more worrying is that this access included the product development environment. The problem there isn’t particularly the leak of the source code — one of the covered projects is NGINX, which is already open source software. The real danger is that changes could have been surreptitiously added to those codebases. The fact that NGINX is Open Source goes a long way to alleviate that danger, and when combined with the security built into tools like git, it seems very unlikely that malicious code could be sneaked into the NGINX public code base. A thorough review of the rest of the F5 codebases has similarly come up negative, and so far it looks like the supply-chain bullet has been dodged. Continue reading “This Week In Security: F5, SonicWall, And The End Of Windows 10” →

This Week In Security: ID Breaches, Code Smell, And Poetic Flows

October 10, 2025 by 10 Comments

Discord had a data breach back on September 20th, via an outsourced support contractor. It seems it was a Zendesk instance that was accessed for 58 hours through a compromised contractor user account. There have been numbers thrown around from groups claiming to be behind the breach, like 1.6 Terabytes of data downloaded, 5.5 million user affected, and 2.1 million photos of IDs.

Discord has pushed back on those numbers, stating that it’s about 70,000 IDs that were leaked, with no comments on the other claims. To their credit, Discord has steadfastly refused to pay any ransom. There’s an interesting question here: why were Discord users’ government issued IDs on record with their accounts?

The answer is fairly simple: legal compliance. Governments around the world are beginning to require age verification from users. This often takes the form of a scan of valid ID, or even taking a picture of the user while holding the ID. There are many arguments about whether this is a good or bad development for the web, but it looks like ID age verification is going to be around for a while, and it’ll make data breaches more serious.

In similar news, Salesforce has announced that they won’t be paying any ransoms to the group behind the compromise of 39 different Salesforce customers. This campaign was performed by calling companies that use the Salesforce platform, and convincing the target to install a malicious app inside their Saleforce instance. Continue reading “This Week In Security: ID Breaches, Code Smell, And Poetic Flows” →

This Week In Security: Three Billion SS Numbers, IPv6 RCE, And Ring -2

August 16, 2024 by 3 Comments

You may have heard about a very large data breach, exposing the Social Security numbers of three billion individuals. Now hang on. Social Security numbers are a particularly American data point, and last time we checked there were quite a few Americans shy of even a half of a billion’s worth. As [Troy Hunt] points out, there are several things about this story that seem just a bit odd.

First up, the claim is that this is data grabbed from National Public Data, and there’s even a vague notice on their website about it. NPD is a legitimate business, grabbing data on as many people as possible, and providing services like background checks and credit checks. It’s not impossible that this company has records on virtually every citizen of the US, UK, and Canada. And while that’s far less than 2.9 billion people, it could feasibly add up to 2.9 billion records as was originally claimed.

The story gets strange as we consider the bits of data that have been released publicly, like a pair of files shared with [Troy] that have names, birthdays, addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers. Those had a total of 2.69 billion records, with an average of 3 records for each ID number. That math is still just a little weird, since the US has to date only generated 450 million SSNs and change.

So far all we have are partial datasets, and claims on the Internet. The story is that there’s a grand total of 4 TB of data once uncompressed. The rest of the details are unclear, and it’s likely to take some time for the rest of the story to come out. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Three Billion SS Numbers, IPv6 RCE, And Ring -2” →

This Week In Security: XZ, ATT, And Letters Of Marque

April 5, 2024 by 11 Comments

The xz backdoor is naturally still the top story of the week. If you need a refresher, see our previous coverage. As expected, some very talented reverse engineers have gone to work on the code, and we have a much better idea of what the injected payload does.

One of the first findings to note is that the backdoor doesn’t allow a user to log in over SSH. Instead, when an SSH request is signed with the right authentication key, one of the certificate fields is decoded and executed via a system() call. And this makes perfect sense. An SSH login leaves an audit trail, while this backdoor is obviously intended to be silent and secret.

It’s interesting to note that this code made use of both autotools macros, and the GNU ifunc, or Indirect FUNCtions. That’s the nifty feature where a binary can include different versions of a function, each optimized for a different processor instruction set. The right version of the function gets called at runtime. Or in this case, the malicious version of that function gets hooked in to execution by a malicious library. Continue reading “This Week In Security: XZ, ATT, And Letters Of Marque” →

Thingiverse Data Leaked — Check Your Passwords

October 14, 2021 by 40 Comments

Every week seems to bring another set of high-profile data leaks, and this time it’s the turn of a service that should be of concern to many in our community. A database backup from the popular 3D model sharing website Thingiverse has leaked online, containing 228,000 email addresses, full names, addresses, and passwords stored as unsalted SHA-1 or bcrypt hashes. If you have an account with Thingiverse it is probably worth your while to head over to Have I Been Pwned to search on your email address, and just to be sure you should also change your password on the site. Our informal testing suggests that not all accounts appear to be contained in the leak, which appears to relate to comments left on the site.

Aside from the seriousness of a leak in itself, the choice of encryption should raise a few eyebrows. Both SHA-1 and bcrypt can be considered broken or at best vulnerable to attack here in 2021, so much so that for any website to have avoided migration to a stronger algorithm indicates a very poor attention to website security on the part of Thingiverse. We’d like to think that it would serve as a salutary warning to other website operators in our field, to review and upgrade their encryption, but we suspect readers will agree that this won’t be the last time we report on such a leak and nervously check our own login details.