X (Formerly Twitter): Ability to perform actions (Tweet, Retweet, DM) and other actions, unauthenticated, on any account with SMS enabled.

Summary: By knowing the mobile phone number associated with a Twitter account, or by using random mobile phone numbers! It is possible to perform the following actions against a target without their knowledge or interaction. With no account takeover scenario. It's a case of, if I know the mobile...

Phishing Campaign Toolkit: King Phisher

King Phisher is a tool for testing and promoting user awareness by simulating real world phishing attacks. It features an easy to use, yet very flexible architecture allowing full control over both emails and server content. King Phisher can be used to run campaigns ranging from simple awareness...

CVE-2018-20231

CVE-2018-20231 affects the WordPress Two Factor Authentication plugin (pre-1.3.13). The vulnerability is a CSRF flaw that allows remote attackers to disable 2FA by triggering tfa_enable_tfa due to missing nonce validation. Impact is partial to high: it can disable two-factor protection, leaving a...

Two Factor Authentication <= 1.3.12 - Disable Two Factor Authentication CSRF

According to the changelog: "Fix a logged-in CSRF vulnerability reported by Martijn Korse www.bitnesswise.com. Due to a missing nonce check, if an attacker was able to persuade a personally-targetted victim who was currently logged in to their WordPress account to visit a personally-crafted for t...

Real-Time Attacks Against Two-Factor Authentication

Attackers are targeting two-factor authentication systems: Attackers working on behalf of the Iranian government collected detailed information on targets and used that knowledge to write spear-phishing emails that were tailored to the targets' level of operational security, researchers with...

Bad Consumer Security Advice

There are lots of articles about there telling people how to better secure their computers and online accounts. While I agree with some of it, this article contains some particularly bad advice: 1. Never, ever, ever use public unsecured Wi-Fi such as the Wi-Fi in a café, hotel or airport. To...

Instagram Accidentally Exposed Some Users' Passwords In Plaintext

Instagram has recently patched a security issue in its website that might have accidentally exposed some of its users' passwords in plain text. The company recently started notifying affected users of a security bug that resides in a newly offered feature called "Download Your Data" that allows...

Troy Hunt on Passwords

Troy Hunt has a good essay about why passwords are here to stay, despite all their security problems: This is why passwords aren't going anywhere in the foreseeable future and why insert thing here isn't going to kill them. No amount of focusing on how bad passwords are or how many accounts have...

CVE-2018-16465

Nextcloud Server is affected when used with versions prior to 14.0.0. The issue is a missing state that would have enforced a second factor at login if the 2FA provider failed to load, effectively allowing a 2FA bypass under certain conditions. This vulnerability is described in advisories NC-SA-...

Phishing for knowledge

When we talk about phishing, top of mind are fake banking sites, payment systems, as well as mail and other globally popular services. However, cybercriminals have their fingers in far more pies than that. Unobviously, perhaps, students and university faculties are also in the line of fire. The...

Is FIDO the future instrument to prove our identity?

FIDO, short for Fast IDentity Online, is an industry consortium started in 2013 to address the lack of interoperability among strong authentication devices and the problems users face creating and remembering multiple usernames and passwords. Among the founders were those who work in the financia...

Facebook Is Using Your Two-Factor Authentication Phone Number to Target Advertising

From Kashmir Hill: Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn't hand over at all, but that was collected from other...

Is two-factor authentication (2FA) as secure as it seems?

Two-factor authentication 2FA was invented to add an extra layer of security to the—now considered old-fashioned and insecure—simple login procedure of entering a username and password. One of the most well-known examples of 2FA is when you try to log into a familiar website from a different...

U.S. Mobile Giants Want to be Your Online Identity

The four major U.S. wireless carriers today detailed a new initiative that may soon let Web sites eschew passwords and instead authenticate visitors by leveraging data elements unique to each customer's phone and mobile subscriber account, such as location, customer reputation, and physical...

How to Secure SSH Access to the NetScaler Appliance with Public Key Authentication

This article contains information about securing administrative access to the NetScaler appliance by using the public key authentication mechanism of Secure Shell SSH. Requirements To complete the procedure in this document, the NetScaler appliance must have the following tools: An SSH client...

Instagram Adds 3 New Security Tools to Make its Platform More Secure

Instagram is growing quickly—and with the second most popular social media network in the world behind just Facebook, the photo-sharing network absolutely dominates when it comes to user interactions. And with great success comes great responsibility—responsibility to keep users' accounts safe,...

Instagram Adds 3 New Security Tools to Make its Platform More Secure

Instagram is growing quickly—and with the second most popular social media network in the world behind just Facebook, the photo-sharing network absolutely dominates when it comes to user interactions. And with great success comes great responsibility—responsibility to keep users' accounts safe,...

GHSA-X489-JJWM-52G7 Tinfoil Devise-two-factor does not "burn" a successfully validated one-time password (OTP)

Tinfoil Devise-two-factor before 2.0.0 does not strictly follow RFC 6238 § 5.2 and does not "burn" a successfully validated one-time password aka OTP, which allows physically proximate attackers with a target user's login credentials to log in as said user by obtaining the OTP through performing ...

Good Primer on Two-Factor Authentication Security

Stuart Schechter published a good primer on the security issues surrounding two-factor authentication. While it's often an important security measure, it's not a panacea. Stuart discusses the usability and security issues that you have to think about before deploying the system...

Widespread Instagram Hack Locking Users Out of Their Accounts

Instagram has been hit by a widespread hacking campaign that appears to stem from Russia and have affected hundreds of users over the past week, leaving them locked out of their accounts. A growing number of Instagram users are taking to social media, including Twitter and Reddit, to report a...