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Has iTunes Been Hacked?
An anonymous reader writes "Betanews has a series of articles talking about an apparent hack in iTunes that has resulted in fraudulent charges for some users involving Sega's Kingdom Conquest game. The reports start with a personal account from reporter Ed Oswald, who was a victim of the hack itself. The next story adds reports from readers, and the most recent story adds additional reports, with Oswald saying the number of reports received are in the 'dozens.' Apple has yet to confirm the existence of a hack, although reports have appeared on Sega's own support forums, Apple discussion boards, and through other news outlets."
can't be: there are no viruses on Apple. Go ask your local Genius !
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Half a dozen years ago, I worked at a company that got hacked due to a web vulnerability. The hackers simply used our storage to store geman porn. But it was still a hack. And it went unreported. It was detemrined that there was no value in reporting the hack since it would affect stock value.
I am betting that the VAST majority of hack never get reported for this exact reason.
So you closed the vulnerability and kept the stash?
This is what bugged me about general security advice: people are recommended not to re-use passwords over a variety of web sites (sensible). However the solutions proposed are to store these passwords in a local "password vault" protected with just a single password, or for all sites to use a centralised log-in system such as Google or OpenID or whatever.
Now if really those web masters all follow suit and all switch to doing their logins using Google: is that any safer than re-using a password? If Google gets hacked, logins to all web sites are suddenly on the streets. Google's security may be better than Sony's, that's not said that it can not be breached.
Or if a keylogger finds its way on your computer, then the complete password vault can be opened in one go.
I've worked in IT security for a long time and for banks... The sheer number of unreported hacks at banks and at retail stores would blow your mind. People mistakenly get angry at the hackers (which is how the media has trained most everyone to think) when in reality it is almost always gross negligence on the hack-ee side and they deserve the ire.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
I very recently had the same situation that is described in the articles happen to my iTtunes Account. I received 2 emails for gift cards purchased through the iTunes store. As I was on vacation with no PC and thus no iTunes access, and not buying gift cards, I knew something was up. At first, I was thinking they were actually spam/phishing emails, as they listed the last 4 digits of a Credit Card that didn't match any of my Credit cards. Without iTunes, all I could do was access my Apple ID account through the web on my phone, and when logged into my account, I saw that my billing information had been changed.
Luckily I had moved about 3 weeks before, and updated my billing info with my credit card, and not in iTunes (or I suspect I would have had several more app/gift card purchases on my own card.) The strange part was that they didn't change my password at all, or any security related questions. It seems as all they did was change my billing info to some one else's and buy $100 worth of gift cards (Who knows what they were used for...).
I changed my iTunes Password, and contacted Apple Technical support, and all I got was a standard form letter about how I could dispute the charges on my credit card (even though I had pointed out that it *wasn't* my credit card info). They locked my account and after a short investigation they enabled it with no indication of anything other than their form letter.
I will freely admit that my password was vulnerable to a dictionary attack, as in the past, I wasn't too worried about someone buying me lots of music, but have since changed it. However, I had no indication that someone was attempting to access my account. If someone was indeed using a dictionary attack on my account, I would have hoped Apple would notice several thousand invalid logins on an account and do something about it.
I suspect there is someone named Jason in Seattle, who is wondering why they have a $100 purchase from iTunes on their MasterCard...
Yep. My bank recently called and canceled my CC. The trigger? The number was attempted to be used for a small ITMS purchase. The fraud department at the bank said that buying a 99c song at ITMS is quick way to verify if they have the right info or not. In my case they used the incorrect pin digits from the back of the card and the bank denied the charge, but it must work some of the time.
This may be unrelated, but yesterday I noticed that my iTunes account had became corrupted with someone else's data. My first name, last name, address and registered CC number became someone else's info. Had I not noticed, I would have been making charges against this other persons account. Maybe someone wrote one messed up database query and screwed up a massive amount of people's payment association. Some users are starting to notice they have someone else's info and are going on a buying spree. Or people are just making their normal purchases and are unknowingly charging other people's accounts, like I almost did last night.
So you closed the vulnerability and kept the stash?
Close the vulnerability? Don't be daft man! That sounds like the kind of automatic update that is best left enabled.
irregardless of any other ire given
Irregardless is not a word. You may have a point, but your use of a non-word makes me wonder.
The opposite of progress is congress
I'm watching how this develops, I purchased my wife
Was she more than $.99?
Would you buy another?
Have you seen any fraudulent wife purchases on your bill?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
However Apple's users are certainly prone to social engineering.
Of course I'm prone to social engineering. Why else would I have an iMac. And a MacBook. Two iPods. One iPhone (and two iPods and an iPhone for my kid.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
In my case they used the incorrect pin digits from the back of the card and the bank denied the charge, but it must work some of the time.
Sorry for being pedantic but the card security code (also known as CSC, CVV, CVV2, etc.) is not a PIN code.
The PIN for Mastercard or VISA cards is a code you as the user must remember, here in Europe it is used pretty much every time you use your card instead of a signature.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Also about half a dozen years ago, a CEO in a software company was suffering one way transmission on VoIP calls and as the manufacturer of the VoIP hardware and software, we'd had technicians trying to fix the problem for months - countless hardware was changed, IP stations, etc. etc. because the customer was screaming at my company daily and it had been escalated to the highest levels.
As a security & network guy, I got dragged in at the later stages, myself and another consultant went through some packet sniff captures when the problem was happening and we eventually worked out that someone from within the software company was trying to do a man-in-the-middle attack to snoop on the CEO's calls, he/she clearly hadn't got it working right and was interrupting one of the transmission paths, hence the problem.
We emailed the analysis to the customer and showed it was someone in their company causing the problem. From that point on, it went completely quiet - no daily secreaming from the customer, not even an acknowledgement of our emailed analysis.
I don't know if higher up in my company we billed the customer for all the work we did or if anything was said afterwards but this was definitely hushed very quickly within that software company.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.