Hacker steals 83,000 accounts from UPI news agency

One of the oldest news companies in the world was hit by hackers. Compromised account information is now for sale on the dark web.

A hacker is selling a database supposedly containing 83,000 compromised accounts from UPI.com, the website of the 110-year-old American news agency United Press International.

After being contacted by CyberScoop, UPI alerted its entire email subscriber base Tuesday and removed login pages and entire sections of its website.

For $100 (about 0.09 in bitcoin), a buyer gets emails, names and passwords in a database being sold on AlphaBay, the largest black market on the dark net. The passwords are hashed with the MD5 algorithm, an out-of-date technology with significant vulnerabilities. The seller himself had already cracked some of the passwords.

The listing boasts that the data has not yet been published anywhere else. The seller declined to provide details on the breach itself or the age of the information.

The seller, zerodark70, provided CyberScoop with a small handful of samples to verify that data. They contained usernames, real names, email addresses and encrypted passwords. The samples were incomplete, so the full extent of the data included is unclear. To verify the data, CyberScoop contacted victims of the dump who confirmed details within the database.

In the middle of the verification process, UPI removed the login page from the UPI Next section of the website. UPI Next is the global media development division of UPI and includes hundreds of international students and faculty.

The breached accounts also appear to include all of UPI’s of email subscribers, which amounts to tens of thousands, as well as their executives, journalists and other employees who have worked at UPI within the last several years.

Launched in 1907, UPI was one of the United States’ major news wires during the 20th century. UPI’s alumni list is long and distinguished, including Walter Cronkite, but the company shrank considerably in recent decades while the Associated Press grew to dominate the domestic market. Even so, journalists working at UPI still regularly interact with top U.S. officials in the defense and energy sector. Journalists are high-value targets for hackers in large part due to the fact that they keep close and active relationships with powerful individuals.

UPI was notably hacked in 2015 when attackers — a UPI IT director blamed the Syrian Electronic Army, a group credited with many previous hacks  — hijacked the news agency’s Twitter account and announced that World War III had commenced. It took a couple of hours but UPI eventually issued a correction. 

Government

• FBI officials say AI is bolstering adversaries, emphasizing need to focus on cyber basics, patching

• Feds accuse China of ‘systematic’ distillation of U.S. AI models

• CIA’s Michael Ellis says cyber intelligence is changing how the agency operates

• Jail time for Maine child in 764 marks turning point in federal law enforcement

Technology

• FCC proposes public scorecard to rate telecoms on anti-robocall efforts

• Pegasus, NoviSpy variant spyware found on devices of Serbian activists

• Wyden seeks upgraded NSA security guidance on commercial VPN use

• The Collective Cyber Defense letter wrote your next vendor questionnaire

Threats

• Chinese espionage groups swarm to exploit triple-link chain of zero-days

• Microsoft discloses two actively exploited zero-days among 974 vulnerabilities

• Russian national extradited to US for alleged involvement in bank-account takeover scheme

• Attackers exploit zero-days in consistently besieged SonicWall product

Policy

• Whistleblower says USPS deploying new, ‘untested’ IT systems governing mail-in ballots

• ‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

• Former sexual abuse victims say Grok used their images, videos to train deepfake capabilities

• Cyber threats nudge Trump to sign executive order on foreign equipment in U.S. energy infrastructure