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Malware and botnet detections also soar

West Sussex man blackmailed his victims

The Emotet botnet continues to evolve and now includes a credit card stealer module

August Patch Tuesday tackles 121 CVEs, 17 critical bugs and one zero-day bug exploited in the wild.

Earlier this year, our global Connected Family Study revealed the online habits of parents and their children. What we found called for a closer look. 

One finding that leaped out, in particular, is—cyberbullying occurs far more often than parents think. And in many cases, children are keeping it from their parents.  

Now with our follow-on research, we set out to answer many of the questions families have about cyberbullying. Where it happens most, who’s most affected, and are children cyberbullying others without even knowing it? 

Our report, “Hidden in Plain Sight: More Dangers of Cyberbullying Emerge,” provides insights into these questions and several more. We’ll cover the top findings here in this blog, while you can get the full story by downloading the report here. 

Worries about cyberbullying have only grown in 2022—and they appear justified. 

Even as stay-at-home mandates in 2020 and 2021 saw children exposed to more cyberbullying while they spent more time online, our ten-country survey found that concerns about cyberbullying in 2022 are even higher today: 

• 60% of children said they were more worried this year about cyberbullying compared to last year.    
• 74% of parents are more worried this year about their child being cyberbullied than last. 

And just as the level of concern is high, the findings show us why. Families reported alarming rates of racially motivated cyberbullying, along with high rates of attacks on the major social media and messaging platforms.  

Additionally, children shared insights into who’s doing the bullying (it’s largely people who know them) and more than half are the ones doing the bullying—and they don’t even realize it. 

Further findings include: 

• Cyberbullies are aiming racist attacks at children as young as ten. 
• Millions of children have deleted their social media accounts to avoid cyberbullying.  
• Despite its efforts, Meta’s social media and messaging platforms have the highest level of cyberbullying. 
• A growing number of parents turn to therapy to help their children deal with cyberbullying. 

Regional and cultural backdrops give cyberbullying a distinctive feel. 

Our research further revealed how the face of cyberbullying takes on different form around the globe. From nation to nation, the influences of polarized politics, racial relations, and different traditions in parent-child relationships shape and re-shape the forms of cyberbullying that children see. 

Each of our ten nations surveyed set themselves apart with trends of their own, some of them including: 

• United States: Despite some of the most engaged parents, children in the U.S. experience among the highest rates of cyberbullying in its most extreme forms, such as sexual harassment, compromised privacy, and personal attacks.  
• India: Cyberbullying reaches alarming highs as more than 1 in 3 kids face cyber racism, sexual harassment, and threats of physical harm as early as at the age of 10—making India the #1 nation for reported cyberbullying in the world.  
• Canada: Canadian children experience cyberbullying largely on par with global rates—yet their parents act on it less often than other parents. Meanwhile, Canadian children are the least likely to seek help when it happens to them.  
• Australia: Australian cyberbullying rates dropped significantly since our last report, yet Snapchat stands out as a primary platform for cyberbullying, more than anywhere else in the world. And of all parents worldwide, Australians feel most strongly that technology companies should do more to protect their children. 

Cyberbullying in 2022: The facts confirm your feelings. 

These new findings reflect the concerns of parents and children alike—cyberbullying remains a pervasive and potentially harmful fact of life online, particularly as racism and other severe forms of cyberbullying take rise.  

Without question, cyberbullying endures as a persistent growing pain that the still relatively young internet has yet to shake. 

The solution is arguably just as complex as the factors that give cyberbullying its shape—cultural, regional, technological, societal, even governmental. Addressing one factor alone won’t curb it. Significantly curtailing cyberbullying for an internet that’s far safer than it is today requires addressing those factors in concert.   

While we recognize that tall order for what it is, and as a leader in online protection, we remain committed to it.   

With these findings, and continued research to come, our aim is to further an understanding of cyberbullying for all—whether that’s educators, technology innovators, policymakers, and of course parents. With this understanding, programs, platforms, and legislation can put protections in place that still allow for companies to innovate and create platforms that people love to use. Safely and securely. 

The post More Dangers of Cyberbullying Emerge—Our Latest Connected Family Report appeared first on McAfee Blog.

One way to tame your email inbox is to get in the habit of using unique email aliases when signing up for new accounts online. Adding a “+” character after the username portion of your email address — followed by a notation specific to the site you’re signing up at — lets you create an infinite number of unique email addresses tied to the same account. Aliases can help users detect breaches and fight spam. But not all websites allow aliases, and they can complicate account recovery. Here’s a look at the pros and cons of adopting a unique alias for each website.

What is an email alias? When you sign up at a site that requires an email address, think of a word or phrase that represents that site for you, and then add that prefaced by a “+” sign just to the left of the “@” sign in your email address. For instance, if I were signing up at example.com, I might give my email address as krebsonsecurity+example@gmail.com. Then, I simply go back to my inbox and create a corresponding folder called “Example,” along with a new filter that sends any email addressed to that alias to the Example folder.

Importantly, you don’t ever use this alias anywhere else. That way, if anyone other than example.com starts sending email to it, it is reasonable to assume that example.com either shared your address with others or that it got hacked and relieved of that information. Indeed, security-minded readers have often alerted KrebsOnSecurity about spam to specific aliases that suggested a breach at some website, and usually they were right, even if the company that got hacked didn’t realize it at the time.

Alex Holden, founder of the Milwaukee-based cybersecurity consultancy Hold Security, said many threat actors will scrub their distribution lists of any aliases because there is a perception that these users are more security- and privacy-focused than normal users, and are thus more likely to report spam to their aliased addresses.

Holden said freshly-hacked databases also are often scrubbed of aliases before being sold in the underground, meaning the hackers will simply remove the aliased portion of the email address.

“I can tell you that certain threat groups have rules on ‘+*@’ email address deletion,” Holden said. “We just got the largest credentials cache ever — 1 billion new credentials to us — and most of that data is altered, with aliases removed. Modifying credential data for some threat groups is normal. They spend time trying to understand the database structure and removing any red flags.”

According to the breach tracking site HaveIBeenPwned.com, only about .03 percent of the breached records in circulation today include an alias.

Email aliases are rare enough that seeing just a few email addresses with the same alias in a breached database can make it trivial to identify which company likely got hacked and leaked said database. That’s because the most common aliases are simply the name of the website where the signup takes place, or some abbreviation or shorthand for it.

Hence, for a given database, if there are more than a handful of email addresses that have the same alias, the chances are good that whatever company or website corresponds to that alias has been hacked.

That might explain the actions of Allekabels, a large Dutch electronics web shop that suffered a data breach in 2021. Allekabels said a former employee had stolen data on 5,000 customers, and that those customers were then informed about the data breach by Allekabels.

But Dutch publication RTL Nieuws said it obtained a copy of the Allekabels user database from a hacker who was selling information on 3.6 million customers at the time, and found that the 5,000 number cited by the retailer corresponded to the number of customers who’d signed up using an alias. In essence, RTL argued, the company had notified only those most likely to notice and complain that their aliased addresses were suddenly receiving spam.

“RTL Nieuws has called more than thirty people from the database to check the leaked data,” the publication explained. “The customers with such a unique email address have all received a message from Allekabels that their data has been leaked – according to Allekabels they all happened to be among the 5000 data that this ex-employee had stolen.”

HaveIBeenPwned’s Hunt arrived at the conclusion that aliases account for about .03 percent of registered email addresses by studying the data leaked in the 2013 breach at Adobe, which affected at least 38 million users. Allekabels’s ratio of aliased users was considerably higher than Adobe’s — .14 percent — but then again European Internet users tend to be more privacy-conscious.

While overall adoption of email aliases is still quite low, that may be changing. Apple customers who use iCloud to sign up for new accounts online automatically are prompted to use Apple’s Hide My Email feature, which creates the account using a unique email address that automatically forwards to a personal inbox.

What are the downsides to using email aliases, apart from the hassle of setting them up? The biggest downer is that many sites won’t let you use a “+” sign in your email address, even though this functionality is clearly spelled out in the email standard.

Also, if you use aliases, it helps to have a reliable mnemonic to remember the alias used for each account (this is a non-issue if you create a new folder or rule for each alias). That’s because knowing the email address for an account is generally a prerequisite for resetting the account’s password, and if you can’t remember the alias you added way back when you signed up, you may have limited options for recovering access to that account if you at some point forget your password.

What about you, Dear Reader? Do you rely on email aliases? If so, have they been useful? Did I neglect to mention any pros or cons? Feel free to sound off in the comments below.

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