Episode: 3743
Title: HPR3743: HPR News
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3743/hpr3743.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:51:25

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,743 for Wednesday the 7th of December 2022.
Today's show is entitled HPR News.
It is the 20th show of some guy on the internet and is about 10 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is news for the community by the community.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
This is the news show, HPR News, starting off with threat analysis, your attack surface.
Microsoft confirms a server misconfiguration led to 65,000 companies data leak.
Microsoft misconfigured an Azure Blob storage server causing a major security breach.
Attackers were able to access unauthorized customer data.
SOC Radar, a cybersecurity company, is calling the security breach Blue Blade.
SOC Radar discovered the breach on September 24th, 2022.
Microsoft is attempting to downplay the security breach, but security researcher Kevin Buehmont
isn't buying it.
Mr. Buehmont suggests that Microsoft dropped the ball on informing its customers
and federal regulators of the security breach in a timely manner.
For our next article,
Hidden ads malware affects over 1 million Android users.
MacAfee's mobile research team identified multiple apps containing malware on Google's Play Store.
After install, the malicious Android apps automatically run without the user knowing or interacting
with the app. That's right, they automatically run after install.
They're happy.
These malicious apps then disguise themselves by changing their icon to the Google Play icon
and renaming themselves to either Google Play or Settings.
The malicious apps quickly create permanent malicious services.
MacAfee's mobile research team demonstrates the resilience of the malware by using
Kill-9 on the service processes.
More malicious processes generate immediately as if nothing happened.
For our next article,
fully undetectable PowerShell backdoor disguised as part of Windows Update.
Director of security research at Safe Reach,
Tomarbar stated,
The covert self-employed tool and the associated C2 command seem to be the work of a sophisticated
unknown threat actor who has targeted approximately 100 victims.
Oh no!
Based on a metadata found within the malicious document,
it seems to be a LinkedIn-based spearfishing attack,
which ultimately leads to the execution of a PowerShell script via a piece of macro code.
The macro drops update.vbs creates a scheduled task pretending to be part of the Windows update,
which will execute the updater.vbs script from a fake update folder under
slash app data slash local slash Microsoft slash Windows.
Said Tomar,
Currently, 32 security vendors in 18 anti-malware engines
have flagged the decoy document and the PowerShell scripts as malicious.
Yay!
The findings come as Microsoft has taken steps to block Excel forms and visual basic application
macros by default across Office apps, prompting threat actors to pivot toward alternative delivery
methods. I imagine this is a major issue inside of work environments and school environments,
where users slash students share documents on Microsoft Cloud.
If one person gets a hold of the malicious document,
then they just spreads like wildfire across the environment.
There will be links down in the show notes.
I've turned certain words in the hyperlinks where you can find out more about what steps
Microsoft has taking as well as the alternative delivery methods the attackers are using.
Next up, user spakes.
Texas sues Google for biometric data collection.
The great state of Texas has filed a lawsuit against Google claiming that the tech bohemeth
has taken user biometric data without permission.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claims Google is illegally data harvesting Texans using features
and devices such as Google Photos, Google Assistant, and Nest Hub Max.
Alright, I can just imagine this guy sitting somewhere down in Texas on a front porch,
hollering it at his phone with an image of the Google logo and he's drinking from a jar of
moon shine that he just brewed in his truck radiator on his way home from work.
That's how I picture this guy because there's no way in hell he honestly believes that people
don't know Google is harvesting their data.
That Ulyss bulletproof right, whatever you do with that device, whatever sensors that device
has on it, cameras, microphones, the ability to do the fingerprint reading.
If it can collect any form of data, Google has it.
Same thing with Apple, same thing with I don't know LG Samsung, you name it.
I also imagine seeing Google's lawyers just planning how this trial will go
and rather than actually showing up for the trial, they just send a pallet of money.
So everything Ken Paxton has to argue, the judge will just look over at the pile of money and say,
nope, doesn't add up. Let's pivot back to threat analysis.
The next story, millions of patients compromised in hospital data leak.
Nearly three million Illinois and Wisconsin patients are caught in a hospital data breach.
Advocate Aurora Health, which operates 27 hospitals, said in a statement.
The breach may have exposed information, including a patient's medical provider,
type of appointments, medical procedures, date and locations of scheduled appointments,
and IP addresses.
The system blamed the breach on the use of pixels.
Computer code that collects information on how a user interacts with their website.
Wow, I can't believe this. This computer code pixels includes products developed by Google
and Facebook's parent company meta that make the collected data accessible to those companies
like Aurora Health. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, here in the United States of America,
Google and Facebook are in control of your health care.
Or at least the information surrounding your health care.
The health care industry's use of pixels has come under wide criticism from privacy advocates
who warned that the technologies used violates federal patent and privacy laws.
A report published in June by the markup found that many of the country's top ranked hospitals
used the meta pixel.
Wow, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know what to tell you. I can't believe it.
Our health care system is so difficult that regular citizens can't get health care.
You can't go across state lines to get better health care if you could even afford it in the first
place, right? So they lock you into a state which limits the amount of health care you can receive.
You know, the options of insurance you can get so you can't get a cheaper plan from a neighboring
state and then they make it so expensive that you can't even afford it in the first place.
On top of that, to add insult to entry, they give your data to Facebook.
I mean, to stop and think about that, Facebook and Google can tie your medical records to some
account online and these people have no hip-hop obligations. There are no laws or anything protecting
your data. Once it's in the hands of Facebook, they have no federal regulation that says how they
must house this data. Who can have access to it? Nothing. Your data is just raw out there in
the hands of Facebook. Meanwhile, everybody's upset about something on Twitter. You know, I haven't
heard one person stop and talk about this, but yet, you know, apparently the Tesla guy in Twitter,
that that's worth chatting about. Let me put it this way. Not if, but when Facebook suffers
another day to breach, imagine having not only your Facebook account being compromised,
but also any medical diagnosis that you have had any sort of appointments that you've made
toward that diagnosis, any sort of embarrassing health conditions. They maybe they're not embarrassing,
but they're private. You don't want it out there and they're open like that.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to leave you with that one to chew on because that one
was a little bit upsetting to hear from you personally, but I want to know what you think about that.
What do you think about Google and Meta, you know, with air quotes? What do you think about them
being in control of your health care data? I'm some guy on the internet. This is HPR News and I'm
signing off. You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording
podcast, click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is. Hosting for HPR has been
kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the internet archive, and our sings.net.
On this advice status, today's show is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License.
