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Financial software company Intuit discovered that tax return info was accessed by an unauthorized party after an undisclosed number of TurboTax tax preparation software accounts were breached in a credential stuffing attack. A credential stuffing attack is when attackers compile username and passwords that were leaked from previous security breaches and use those credentials to try and gain access to accounts at other sites. This type of attack works particularly well against users who use the same password at every site. Intuit also states that the breach was discovered during a security review of its systems in the TurboTax data breach notification which was filed with the Office of the Vermont Attorney General. Following the discovery of the security breach, Intuit decided to temporarily disable the TurboTax accounts which were breached in the credential stuffing attack. TurboTax users who had their accounts temporarily deactivated have to contact Intuit using the company's Customer Care department and say "Security" when prompted, after which Intuit employees will walk them through an identity verification procedure designed to help them reactivate their accounts. More details can be found posted on OUR FORUM.

New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo stated that a number of state agencies including the Department of State and the Department of Financial Services will investigate Facebook health data acquisition practices exposed by The Wall Street Journal. According to the WSJ report, 11 of the most popular 70 applications from the Apple and Google app stores are sending sensitive personal information of tens of millions of users to Facebook, even when they weren't logged into their Facebook accounts. Governor Cuomo's press release condemns the iOS and Android apps' health data mining behavior recently uncovered by the WSJ, calling it "an outrageous abuse of privacy." However, in a statement sent by a Facebook spokesperson to The Hill, the social network says that the ones that should be under investigation are the app developers who haven't properly configured what data their apps share with the social network's mobile advertising platform. As the Facebook spokesperson said, "Sharing information across apps on your iPhone or Android device is how mobile advertising works and is industry standard practice. The issue is how apps use information for online advertising." Additionally, "We require app developers to be clear with their users about the information they are sharing with us, and we prohibit app developers from sending us sensitive data. We also take steps to detect and remove data that should not be shared with us." More trouble for Facebook visit OUR FORUM for more.

People who visit adult websites are being exposed on a daily basis to malware, phishing, and malicious spam campaigns, with premium accounts used on these websites that get stolen ending up on dark web markets. While visitors of adult websites being targeted by threat actors is definitely not something new, during 2018 cybercriminals increased their activity dramatically, with attacks targeting adult website credentials, for example, increasing by 300%. Users who were looking around the web for adult content have been safer during 2018, with the number of attacks dropping by roughly 36% from more than a million in 2017 to around 650,000 last year. However, while malware targeting adult content viewers declined in diversity, cybercriminals still managed to push out a larger amount of malware samples throughout 2018. Credential-stealing attacks saw a 300% boost in numbers. According to Kaspersky Lab's year in review report of cyber threats targeting online adult content viewers, credential stealing malware now focuses on a smaller number of websites, cutting down the list from  Brazzers, Chaturbate, Pornhub, Myfreecams, Youporn, Wilshing, Motherless, XNXX, and XVideos, down two only two websites: PornHub and XNXX. To drop malware payloads on their targets' computers, threat actors disguised them as videos on malicious websites they control and used search query results manipulation as the main technique to make sure that their victims were funneled to their first stage infection vectors. In total, in 2018 87,227 users downloaded malware disguised as adult content in 2018, 8% of them have used their company's network instead of using a personal Internet connection. For facts and figures visit OUR FORUM.