Security News This Week: Apple Is Coming for Your Password Manager
The largest data breach ever may be unfolding before our very eyes. What started as incidents impacting Ticketmaster and financial services firm Santander has snowballed into a multi-pronged attack potentially impacting hundreds of companies—and hundreds of millions of people. The source of the allegedly stolen data is Snowflake, a cloud storage firm, whose customers appear to have been targeted with infostealer malware that seemingly allowed hackers to access their Snowflake accounts.
Microsoft has also (and once again) had a bad week. After the tech giant recently announced its new Recall tool—which takes screenshots of everything a person does on their PC every five seconds and makes it all searchable—security researchers set off the red alert that this, frankly, sounds like a terrible idea. Indeed, one researcher used a preview version of Recall to create a tool that extracts all the data stored by the feature in just seconds. Another found that the tool was vulnerable to “privilege escalation” attacks, making it possible for a hacker to access a Recall database even if they don’t have administrative powers. Microsoft apparently took the criticism to heart, however, and will now turn off Recall by default and add additional security measures.
Embattled social media behemoth TikTok had a security scare this week after an attacker targeted high-profile TikTok users via direct messages in the app. TikTok says that only two accounts were successfully hijacked by the attack, while a third, belonging to celebrity Paris Hilton, was targeted but not taken over. Details about the incident remain sparse, but the company said Friday it has fixed the flaw that enabled the malware used to snatch accounts.
