At a glance.
- Instagram user data exposure.
- A look at QUO, a new facet of the criminal-to-criminal marketplace, and its threat to privacy.
- Exmo cryptocurrency exchange hacked.
Facebook Business Suite exposes Instagram user data.
SecurityWeek reports a security flaw has been discovered in the Facebook Business Suite interface that exposes Instagram users’ email addresses and birthdates without user permission. The new interface, introduced by Facebook in September, is designed to allow companies to coordinate all their social media accounts on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp (all owned by Facebook), in one spot. Researcher Saugat Pokharel noticed when messaging an Instagram user through the interface that the user’s email address was fully visible. Upon further investigation, he found that this was the case for all users, even those who had turned off their messaging settings or set their info to private, and user birthdates were exposed as well. Once informed, Facebook patched the issue in under a week, and the discovery earned Pokharel an award of over $13,000.
QUO, the gift that keeps on giving.
Just in time for the holidays, Digital Shadows reports that the dark web has been gifted a new indexing service: QUO. It aims to basically be the Google of the cybercriminal underground, helping users to anonymously search an up-to-date index of more than 20,000 dark web onion sites, totaling more than 200GB of data and 8 million pages. Unlike similar services Kilos and Recon, QUO aims to serve the entire cybercriminal community, as opposed to a select audience, and catalogue the entire dark web, not just particular platforms. The database is constantly updating, with new sites added and terminated sites removed automatically, and users are able to report any errors that might have gone unnoticed. A specialized mirror engine recognizes duplicate sites, adding them to a list of mirror options for each domain, and a sweeping process checks sites for unsuitable content and blacklists them accordingly. Sponsors include dark web marketplace DarkTor and bitcoin mixing platform BitMix.biz.
Hackers make large withdrawals at Exmo.
British cryptocurrency exchange Exmo has announced that recent unusual withdrawal activity is being attributed to threat actors. A security audit revealed a suspiciously large amount of BTC, XRP, ZEC, USDT, ETC and ETH had been withdrawn from hot wallets in the exchange. Exmo stressed that no cold wallets, or currency kept in cold storage, were compromised. However, the affected hot wallets make up almost 5% of total assets. Exmo has agreed to cover any losses and has asked that all exchanges block the accounts connected to the impacted wallets as they investigate the incident. The London police have been notified, and all withdrawals have been temporarily suspended.